Powerless

Donatello Swaney led a simple life working, as his boss euphemistically says, a Garbage Specialist job. His job is to fly six days a week around a group of satellites that follows Vesta as it orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt and collect all the garbage these satellites produce, to dump it in the recycling plant, a very large satellite that classifies the trash, recycle it into different new raw materials, and then sending the refuse to the burning plant to generate energy.

His responsibilities include manning the ship, docking with others crafts, operating the dumpster, punching buttons in his console so the system can bill the sat owners, and go to the next client in line. Occasionally, when a trash chute is blocked, he must get inside it and solve the problem, which usually leaves him stinking like a pig pen gone utterly rotten. In between satellites, he records messages for his only son.

Today, he chose parental advise as a discussion topic.

“Well, my dear son. Here I am, again, working the trash route. I want you to look carefully at your old man’s life. Look at me not with your son’s eyes, but with a man’s eyes. Analyze what you see and ask yourself, is that the kind of man I want to be? A garbage Specialist? Phew, I can tell you, my son, it’s a stinking job and a rotten life.”

Donatello quiets a low noisy alert indicating proximity to his next ‘client’. A satellite that is the worst dumpster of his malodorous job. An entertainment satellite for this group of twelve and it produces the foulest smelling trash this side of the Universe.

“See what I tell you, my son. A shitty job that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody, much less you, my dear boy”. Donatello took a long and deep breath. “You want to be someone in this life, don’t take me as an example, I’m not worth it. Like my deceased father used to tell me every time I failed at something, at anything, ‘You’re a worthless piece of shit, not even fit to be a garbage collector”.

Donatello paused his recording as his focus turned to his immediate job. After docking was completed, he punched the button that in sequence opened the hatch, connected the trash chute to the sat dumpster, and activated the aspirator, which was a big suction pump that would move the trash from dumpster A to dumpster B. But, like always in his shitty life, things became rotten fast. Something got stuck in the chute and the specialist part of his job entered the game. He had to get himself inside the chute to remove the obstruction.

First, he put on a special suit, hence the specialist nickname. It looked almost like an evac suit but sturdier, with a sealed breathing system to recycle the air inside the suit, as no filters o air tanks or anything can be attached to the outside of the suit. To Donatello’s thinking, it was like a condom. Smooth on the outside, with nothing that can get hooked on any of the internal parts of the chute, or on any large piece of hard trash that could drag him to the main dumpster in his ship because if that happened, help was a long way from home. So he wriggled in, found a piece of trash that surpassed tech specs, for which the client will be fined, got everything able again, got out of the chute, and reactivated the sucking pump.

His next step was decontamination before taking his condom off, and disinfection before getting his clothes back on. A disgusting way of life. He got back to his ‘office’, sat in a very uncomfortable couch, punched the set of coordinates for the next Sat, and activated the automatic pilot.

“See what I mean, my son?” He asked after re-engaging the recorder. “A putrid job leads to a shitty life. This malodorous job permeates everything in my life. No woman wants to date a man with such a noxious cologne. Even prostitutes complain and charge me for the extra laundry to get rid of my pestiferous smell. No, my son, do not look upon me as an example of life, I am not worth it. Instead, study, become a professional, and make a good life with a fine couple and a few kids”.

It was a short flight to his next location. Again, he had to get inside his condom to clear an uncommon obstruction, one that broke his suit and made a long gash in his right arm that would make a nice conversation piece, if he doesn’t die from infection and lives to tell the story. So after decontamination and disinfection, had to go to the infirmary to get eleven stitches from a nursebot and then get a full set of injections to booster his immunological system, and take some painkillers.

“The worst of all, my son, is that I will be billed for repairs to the suit and medical expenses. So, whatever you want to be in life, don’t, please, don’t choose to be a garbage specialist. Be a cybertronic engineer or a quantum alchemist or something like that. Please, study, be somebody not like me”.

Like that, record, pause, work, record, pause, work, etc., Donatello passed his working week and the end of it was close enough to finish his long conversation with his son.

“I’m doing the best I can, my dear son. But after a certain moment in the life of any person, things cannot be changed. I’m stuck in the shit. I love you. Always have and always will”.

Donatello typed the address, pressed the send button, and forgot about it, as his ship was docking with the recycling plant and it was time to go to his crappy living unit to burrow in his powerlessness until his next shift.

The ship maintenance tech, who was a new guy on the team, noticed that Donatello sent a long message to a non-existing address.

“Hey sup”, he said to his supervisor, “the stinking guy…”

He was interrupted by the boss. “Garbage specialist, please”.

“Well, okay, the garbage specialist made some mistake in the address of a message he sent, so it didn’t go through”.

“I know, forget about it. It happens every week. He sends a long message to his dead son in the afterlife, but, most unfortunate, there is no IP address for it.