Redeemables

There's a stream of people who look for plastic bottles and other redeemables inside my apartment building's dumpster. The early bird of the batch arrives at 5am in the morning. Not all of these entrpreneurs are poor. For the non-poor the routine has become an addiction. Everybody brings a stick with a hook at one end, a makeshift gaft, to riffle through the rest of the garbage. There's even this girl who jumps into the dumpster, props one of the two hatches up with a cardboard box for barely a foot wide opening and spends an hour in there. One afternoon, the dumpster truck arrived while she was still inside. So I went over and, "Knock, knock. Hi, are you almost done. The dumpster people are here to empty out the bin. Just letting you know."