Can do! SF garbageman's inspiring message touches thousands

Recology of San Francisco garbage collector Aaron Meier works his route in the city's Richmond District. Meier tweeted a message of hope and perseverance for San Francisco in the first week of the coronavirus crisis. It was liked more than 500,000 times. less Recology of San Francisco garbage collector Aaron Meier works his route in the city's Richmond District. Meier tweeted a message of hope and perseverance for San Francisco in the first week of the coronavirus ... more Photo: Recology SF Photo: Recology SF Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Can do! SF garbageman's inspiring message touches thousands 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

In the first week of the coronavirus outbreak in the San Francisco, about the time officials announced the stay-at-home order, garbage collector Aaron Meier was struck by how different the city felt.

It wasn’t just the suddenly unclogged streets and muted shops and restaurants of the Richmond District. Meier could feel the concern, the worry. So he decided to send a message of hope and perseverance.

On Friday of that week, the 50-year-old Recology of San Francisco employee posted the following on Twitter:



“Right now I am feeling an extra sense of pride and purpose as I do my work. I see people, my people, of my city, peeking out their windows at me. They’re scared, we’re scared. Scared but resilient.

“Us garbagemen are gonna keep collecting the garbage, doctors and nurses are gonna keep doctoring and nursing. It’s gonna be ok, we’re gonna make it be ok. I love my city. I love my country. I love my planet Earth. Be good to each other and we’ll get through this."

The tweet logged about a half million likes.

“I tweet my feelings a lot,” Meier says. “I just had to put it out there.”

While trash collector is not one of the riskier “essential” jobs in the city, Meier has had to take additional precautions. He’s less likely to be infected by another person but stands a greater chance of picking up a bug from a used tissue or dirty diaper or contaminated surface.

“The way I have to work is to assume the virus is getting on my clothes, and so I take precautions,” he says. “I’m wearing latex gloves under my normal work gloves.

“I never really touched my face before anyway because I’m always wearing dirty work gloves but now I’m even more cautious. If it does get on me, I can deal with that if it doesn’t get into my respiratory system.”

He takes care to wipe down his truck's interior with a Clorox wipe, including the steering wheel, dashboard and all the buttons and switches.



“I really don’t want to bring it home — that’s my main goal — I go into the garage, I take off all my clothes, I put them in a garbage bag, then I sneak into the house and take a really hot shower,” he says.

Getting up first thing in the morning is the most challenging part of the job. He rises at 1:30 a.m. at his home in San Jose in order to start his shift at 3. It used to start later in the morning, but Recology has had to stagger shifts to minimize person-to-person contact during the pandemic.

“The time is hard for me," he says. "I’m not a morning person. So that’s difficult. Once I’m up and out the door and moving it starts to feel pretty good, because you’re kind of exercising on this job.”

Meier picks up landfill waste and compost bins along his route near Balboa Street and 36th Avenue. Another Recology truck collects recyclables.

Us garbagemen are gonna keep collecting the garbage, doctors and nurses are gonna keep doctoring and nurse-ering. It’s gonna be ok, we’re gonna make it be ok. I love my city. I love my country. I love my planet Earth. Be good to each other and we’ll get through this. 💕 — Jester D (@JustMeTurtle) March 14, 2020

His truck doesn’t have the bin-grabbing mechanical arm you sometimes see on waste collection trucks in suburban communities. The Richmond’s streets are too densely packed with parked cars.

Instead, Meier has to stop his truck, get out, roll the bins to the truck and physically put them in a “tipper” on the side of the vehicle in order to dump them. Its a routine he repeats scores of times each day.



“It wears on your joints over the course of time, so it’s not always good exercise,” Meier says.

Maybe not, but sedentary, work-at-home shut-ins might be envious of the 25,000 steps he logs every day.

Meier says there’s more trash to pick up since the pandemic, but he thinks it’s mostly recyclables. People are ordering online instead of going to stores, and they have more boxes and other packaging to throw out, he says.

Occasionally, customers can’t fit all their landfill waste in the bin and they place loose trash outside of it. Meier says that while Recology is happy to pick up extra trash, when it isn’t bundled properly, it can fall apart and he has to pick it up. That’s when he’s most worried about getting germs and bacteria on his hands and clothes.

Meier enjoys seeing people on his route and knows some of them by name. And he keeps an eye out for kids in the windows.

“I wave and make sure they see me and say hello because this is a hard thing we got to go through right now,” he says.

One morning he found a customer's note on top of a trash bin.

“It was really simple,” he says. “It was just a piece of paper that she had written thank you on. And she put flowers on top of it. That’s all it was. She opened her second-story window and talked to me a little bit.

“I wish I had taken a picture of it, because it did touch me.”

It’s moments like that we should seek out during the pandemic, Meier says.

“Right now nothing is normal and we’ve lost all our gathering places. We need to survive physically, but we also have to survive emotionally. So find little normal moments in your day so you can get through this.”

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Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE Digital Reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate