Don't fight with the garbagemen

My counterpart agency is in charge of garbage collection in town.

They have two rarely functioning vehicles to pick up trash from the county's 30,000 residents. Sometimes another municipal department will lend some dump trucks to help out, but they are only slightly more reliable than the garbage truck..

Given these scant resources and the amount of garbage the residents produce, angry residents come into the office every day to complain about how the garbage truck has not come back for two or three weeks.

These problems typically get resolved with my co-workers agreeing that garbage collection in a problem and saying how little there is that they can control. The car's out of service, they'll say (and it typically is). Then they'll place a call to the garbage collection coordinator who resolves the issue within a couple of days.

Last week, a man came into the office complaining that the garbagemen won't pick up his garbage - even though the truck continues to pass by his house.

Reason for the lack of service: spite.

A few weeks ago, some of the garbage workers looked at the man's wife the wrong way. The man didn't appreciate it too much and confronted the garbage workers about it.

They haven't picked up his garbage since.

After he complained to my office, they called the garbage coordinator to tell his employees that spite is not an acceptable reason to cut someone's service.