
Milton climbs up on a bucket, reaches over the top of the machine--pretty much the same size as its coordinate device, the soda machine--and yanks on a cord. The cable itself is the kind of 220v cord that a washer or a refrigerator uses. Milton crashes down, plug in hand, and the woman starts to yell again.
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Igor, my photographer, has seen enough, and hands me his camera bag, "I'll get up there, let me do it." He steps on the smaller bucket and climbs onto the bigger one.I should have maybe stopped him. He really destroyed his knee a month before and the doctor said if it didn't get better on his own he would need surgery. But I wasn't really thinking about that at the time. He scrambles up the front of the machine and lunges at the cord, knocking it back in on the first try."Yay!" everyone screams in five languages. The screen blinks back on.Igor hops off the cart and crashes through the black flower bucket, shattering one side, and nearly knocking over a small Chinese woman in the process.I forget to ask him if his knee is okay."Here we go! We back in business!"With the goodwill we had garnered after fixing the machine, we used this as a chance to get Thelma to talk to us some more. We wanted to know how she started working in the recycling industry.
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Thelma takes a broom from between the soda collection machines and sweeps the bottle tops that are cluttering the sidewalk around the machines. They end up on the ground in front of the shops until someone like Thelma comes along and sweeps them away. "We don't want somebody to slip," she says with genuine concern. We ask her about some rumors we had heard.
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PHOTOS AND ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY NATE "IGOR" SMITHPreviously:
The Bottle Report - Week 1
The Bottle Report - Secrets of the Orient
