A Sanitation Worker’s Entire Routine, from Waking Up to Trash Collection | Allure

hi my name is nicole does and i'm a new york city sanitation worker during the week and a beauty pageant queen on the weekends i'm going to take you through 24 hours of my beauty and wellness routine i've been a sanitation worker for three and a half years i am actually the official national anthem singer for the sanitation department i've been competing in pageants since i was about 18 years old i have won three different titles so far i was miss staten island miss big apple and i am currently miss brooklyn for america i'm going to be competing in the miss new york for america pageant this july took about three years from start to finish to become fully hired as a sanitation worker i work five or six days a week on a everyday basis but when we are in a snow emergency we are seven days a week 12 hours a day i work all different shifts sometimes i work overnight so that's from 12 midnight to 8 o'clock in the morning sometimes i work at 5 a.m to 1 in the seven a.m to three o'clock in the afternoon or even four p.m to midnight so we are all over the place we can pick anywhere up between eight to 12 tons or more of garbage when i'm on my street sweeper which i'm by myself we probably pick up about maybe two to three tons of garbage a day on a normal shift if i'm working um from 7am to 3pm i wake up at about 5 o'clock in the morning it's 5 15 in the morning and we are gonna not hit snooze and get up and start getting ready for our day i wanted to become a sanitation worker mostly because i wanted to be able to support myself and i wanted to work for new york city my father my uncle and my cousin they're all sanitation workers so i took the civil servant exam they called me to be hired and i took the jump and i was like let's try this and i ended up really enjoying it i'm extremely girly i love pink i love sparkles you know i love all of those very feminine things so when i took the jump to do this very masculine dirty job people were shocked to say the least but i'm actually for the first two titles that i've won i actually performed my talent in my sanitation uniform and i sang i feel pretty on stage so that was a lot of fun classy beauty trashy so i wake up i brush my teeth i just wash my face with water i like to use a toner i use a toner from lush i like to use a moisturizer on my face i use the cetaphil lotion then i go into my stretches i like to stretch every morning so then i do a little bit of what i like to call a strength routine i do some sit-ups some push-ups some couple of different you know core exercises because of the physical job that i have i like to stay in physical shape so the process to become a sanitation worker is first you take a civil servant written exam so that's basically a common knowledge exam and they put you on a waiting list based off your score so i waited about three years or so to finally start hearing about hiring and then from there you do a medical exam to make sure you're physically healthy enough to do the job and then you do a physical exam where it's actually like a garbage obstacle course per se so we have fake cars and fake garbage bags and we have to kind of maneuver ourselves around them and see if you're able to do it in a certain amount of time when i took the physical exam the obstacle course i was the only female there and they had me go first and they give you a pair of gloves to use during the exam work gloves and the man handed me the pair and he goes the last woman who was here failed because these gloves were too big good luck when i first started doing pageants i knew absolutely nothing about doing my hair and makeup which is funny because i'm so girly but i learned and now i do my own hair and makeup i do not put on all of this makeup on a daily basis it takes a very long time for me but i'm learning and yes for the pageants i tend to do my own hair and makeup unless there's somebody willing to help me i did this today i was so proud of me i usually have these a couple of different color palettes that i use i have a ton of them i like to put a little bit of eye shadow a little bit of liner i like to fill in my eyebrows a little bit because it makes you look awake which is what we're going for at five o'clock in the morning i have my hair back and in a bun so it's always it's got to be back you can't have any hair flying around because god forbid something gets caught you don't want any of that when i put my hair up i take more of like a thin black rubber band and i put it in a ponytail first and then i have a thicker hair band where i kind of spin it and roll it into a nice bun so it's really tight and then i tend to put a hat on on top of that make sure nothing is flying anywhere i need to have a manicure all the time but it has to be a gel manicure because if i get regular polish it is gone probably within a couple of hours because of the gloves the grabbing and i need to have short nails if my nails are not short i can't actually grab the bags so they need to be gel short but they need to be done because i'm a beauty queen i like my nose done i also tend to not wear any jewelry we're not usually allowed to wear jewelry if we do it has to be small stud earrings but uh i can't wear my engagement ring which makes me really sad so i've been engaged to my wonderful fiance mikey since september of 2019 he is actually a nypd police officer and he proposed to me right before we took a trip to california i thought he was kidding there's a hidden mickey in my ring i don't know if you like disney but it's in there i think like everyone i was very nervous about the pandemic i was worried about my family me and my fiance were both essential workers so we we went out there and we you know we we just realized we did what we needed to do you know the city needed us you know once garbage collection stops the city stops if snow collection stops the city stops and you know i'm i'm proud to be a part of that because it's it's really just another wheel in the cog that makes the city go and i love that my average uniform usually we our most outer garment should be high visibility we want to make sure that we're seen by the public especially if we're working when it's darker out but just in general you want to make sure that you're being seen in the winter time i wear probably three or four layers of clothing so i have maybe one or two layers of thermals on then i have my long sleeve shirt then i have an inside jacket an outer jacket and the same with the bottom so i like to stay nice and warm in the winter i'm not a winter person which is fun because we plow snow actually when i first came on the job they did not make female sanitation worker pants so when i got my pants they rolled the men's pants and i had them custom tailored to fit me they were taken in they had to pull up the crotch i don't know if there's a more polite word for that and then about a year and a half in they started making female pants which were so much more comfortable heading out to work i leave a little bit before him it's about 6 6 15 which is usually around the time that i leave and he gets to leave at 6 30 so he gets a little extra time than i do later see you later to get myself ready for the day i am in the car listening to abba we are a dancing queen i like to be early or either on time for things and especially with this job i believe my first couple of months on the job i overslept on a 12 to 8 shift i learned very quickly that the earlier you show up the better it is because you don't know with new york city traffic what you're going to be looking at just on top of that it gives you a moment once you get to work to kind of regroup i take a moment to myself in the morning i actually drink energy tea i'm not really a big coffee drinker unless i'm working overnight but i drink a lot of tea in the morning so that's something that i just kind of take a moment when i get to work and just enjoy so on any particular day i could be doing a number of different things on my average day i am driving a street sweeper so we'll drive the street sweeper for about six hours a day because then we need time in the afternoon to to clean the machinery there are days when i'm on what they call a collection route so i'm either picking up your recycling when we had the compost program we were picking up compost or just your everyday garbage there are also days when we're physically out in the street with a hand broom and a shovel and we're cleaning curb lines and sidewalks and then there are days when i am driving loads um in the trucks to the different dumps around the boroughs depends on the day we always have something different well my street sweeper they are actually very slow so we have these new hybrid street sweepers but they sweep up a lot i believe in one shift we could sweep up anywhere between two to three tons of garbage and during leap season as we call it which is fall we are sweeping up probably double that amount no matter what shift i'm working i have a bag with me i carry everything with me because i'm never sure where i might be working or what i might be doing sometimes i'm on a collection truck sometimes i'm in a sweeper so i bring snacks lots of snacks i try to drink four glasses of water i have a big water bottle so i try to drink at least one or two of those a shift i always have cheerios i live off of cheerios i will either eat them dry for breakfast or as a snack i just i live off of cheerios i bring peanut butter granola bars with me i love to eat those bananas are usually my breakfast because i'm more of a grab-and-go type of breakfast that early in the morning when i'm preparing for a pageant i'm just a little bit more conscious about how healthy i'm eating or how often i exercise because i just want to feel physically confident so i'm mentally confident and prepared for the pageant sometimes i make myself smoothies if we had time bananas almond milk powdered peanut butter i personally like to add chia seeds and i always i get made fun of this i always have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch no matter what without fail every single day since i was about five i brought a peanut butter sandwich with me to work and i will not stop peanut butter sandwich inside excited to have lunch tissues are always great to have because especially when you are picking up garbage you do not know what's going to splatter on you so tissues are a must-have i mean i've i've picked up bags and like rats have run out of them you've got anything i mean i picked up bags in the summer that are covered in maggots so um it's worse when it's raining because then the maggots are wet and you're wet and everything's wet one of the grossest things i came across was actually very recently i was working in sunset park i was on a recycling route and i grabbed a cardboard box and i i pulled at it and it wasn't moving and i went to examine it a little closer and it was filled with crabs i don't know if they were alive or not but it was with cramps especially when i'm in the street sweeper i like to wear the mask even though i'm by myself because sometimes the dirt and debris can come in so we just want to take that extra step i always wear gloves thin gloves and i put on the thicker gloves when i'm picking up the actual collection when it comes to disposing of your collection recycling please bag and bundle your cardboard and your paper because if you just put it all inside of one box i'm going to grab it and it is going to go all over the place and nobody wants that and if you're going to dispose of your glass metal paper plastic please be mindful that we are grabbing at bags not knowing what is inside of them so things like nails broken glass things like oxygen tanks helium tanks needles these are all things that i've encountered that i don't think the public is aware of how dangerous they can be to someone who's throwing out their trash now it's the end of the day it's about two o'clock i like to sort of just clean myself up a little bit before i go home and get comfortable when work is done i tend to loiter i love to talk to my co-workers after work actually as of right now because i am prepping for a pageant i've created with the help of one of my co-workers a makeshift runway in the gym of the garage so i kind of walk back and forth in my heels do a little bit of practice because it just gives me more space than i have at home my co-workers i think they needed to get used to me a little bit because i have a personality that i don't think they've seen in my garage before it is always a unique experience when i bring my crowns into the garage or that i'm running around a pair of heels but they've come to i like to think enjoy it there is a particular co-worker richie who i like to call my life coach because i go to him for advice for everything pageants my wedding my career everything but these guys they're great they they're like my my second family they do photo shoots for me i like to take pictures in the garage because the lighting is great i like to spray down everything with lysol i spray down my phone i spray it on my bag my keys everything gets sprayed down before i leave the building so when i get in the car everything is already clean and then i usually tend to leave my uniform at work i have the clean uniforms at home and i leave the dirty ones at work and we have a washing machine at the garage so i wash everything there i think i was already a germaphobe but this job kind of only elevated that we def we don't do shoes in the house there was also one thing i noticed i picked up on when you put your garbage can out in front of your house you grab that with your hands i don't i don't do that because i grab the cans at work with my gloves and i know what my gloves have touched and now it's on the can and i'm not touching that with my hands i'm constantly washing my hands i like to sing good as hell by lizzo while i'm washing my hands i think that's a good 90 seconds i know my dad is a complete neat freak so he definitely i think instilled that i mean both of my parents are neat freaks so that was just something that i grew up just knowing and then on top of that as him being a sanitation worker i he never smelled like garbage and i realized that i don't either i think it's just a matter of how you take care of the uniform and just how you work to make sure that it's inevitable a lot of the times that you will get garbage on you you will get dirty you will get splashed in the face but you know i just you clean up yourself while you're still at the garage so you don't bring it home it is actually not as smelly as you think i've come to realize that there's such a thing as clean garbage and dirty garbage and most average garbage actually doesn't really smell it actually has the strange sweet smell to it but if you have what we might call dirty garbage then you'll smell it you smell like the food that's on the inside or you can smell if there's rodents and things on the inside but for the most part it honestly doesn't smell that bad once we get home depending on the day i tend to take everything that i've already cleaned put it to the side i like to jump into a quick shower we like to go for walks in the afternoon so that's our way of getting a little bit of exercise it's about five o'clock so probably walk for a little bit and then get ready to have dinner we'll see what mikey cooks for us tonight i've done a couple of 5ks but i just really enjoy walking running getting my cardio in i actually just bought a step tracker because i was curious to see how many steps i was walking when i'm on a collection route and it's over ten thousand maybe twelve thousand so it's a lot of steps and then i tend to drink sleepy time tea and possibly do a little bit of reading before bed and i have my little nighttime face routine so i just got out of the shower i like to shower every night or after every shift and now i'm just going to do my nighttime skincare routine i have my reusable makeup remover you wet it and it just takes all the makeup off i didn't have too much on to begin with but whatever it didn't come off in the shower just some leftover makeup i take it off then i use my oil free acne wash rose water this is different from the one i put on in the morning this one's more nourishing sit on overnight then i have my estee lauder advanced night repair this i put under my eyes try to prevent dark circles especially when i work overnight and then i have my estee water revitalizing lotion this is my nighttime lotion and that's our nighttime skincare once i started working for the sanitation department i saw exactly where our recycling goes and what things are recycled so it was just something that i already recycled now i was a little bit more careful about it i tend to try to actually stay away from the recycling in general to see if i can find items that are multi-use so i have the paper towels that you can wash and reuse over again the same with my water bottles my plastic bags just to keep things out of the waste cycle in general i found is something that i wanted to contribute to because seeing all the garbage that gets picked up just on a one shift let alone a daily basis is astronomical if i do have the time to just mellow out it's definitely on a sunday we don't work sundays unless it's voluntary so i take the time to just do the things that i enjoy doing you know i love taking bubble baths i love bath bombs um for me i actually find it very rewarding i do beach cleanups as volunteer work so if i'm not picking up garbage at work i like to do it for fun on the beach but i find it to be so relaxing that i really don't mind doing it at all and then just for me it's you know i love to drink tea read a book watch tv just you know take a moment to decompress because with the scheduling and with the physical work it can be tough if you're looking for a career where you can advance as a woman you can succeed i would highly recommend the sanitation department everybody is incredibly supportive it's a lot of fun being a female in a male dominated role because you get to bring a different type of presence to the people around you and i've only had nothing but the most positive experiences working for the department and i'm so excited to see where my career goes and to just keep moving up the ladder and hopefully you know maybe i'll be commissioner one day it is now 9 30 and i am getting ready for bed thank you allure for following me on my 24 hours of beauty and wellness i hope you learned a little bit about my trashy and a little classy routine good night

Channel: Allure

Views: 465,026

Rating: 4.967905 out of 5

Keywords: allure, blue collar pageant queen, daily routine, day in the life garbage man, dsny, dsny workers, entire routine, essential worker, garbage lady, garbage lady beauty, miss brooklyn for america, new york garbage, new york sanitation, nicole doz, nyc essential worker, pageant queen, sanitation worker, sanitation worker new york, street sweeper routine, street sweeper woman, trash lady, woman sanitation worker, woman trash collector, work it, work it allure, work it routine

Id: JJBETZ_VBik

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021