Street Cleaners

"If the only job there is in the city is to shovel shit for five coppers a day, then you best make sure you're the best damn shit-shoveler in the city while looking for something better to pay for a roof over your head."

"Papa, no one pays in copper. Not since Dad was a kid."

— Grandfather and adult grandchild

Very few go into street cleaning out of love for the job, and in recognition of its status, street cleaning is often a job hired out to children or to adults down on their luck and needing a job of some kind. With the waste of horses, dogs, chickens, people, pigs, and the occasional cattle mixing with rotted meat, vegetation, and other waste food and nonedibles thrown out into streets, the street cleaners have their duties in either hauling away shoveled waste in wheelbarrows or the larger wagons nicknamed "shit-wagons."

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words

— Speaker

Sidebar

Qualifications - Years

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Alternative Names

"Shit Shovelers"

Type

Sanitation

Demand

Vital

Other Associated professions

• Alchemist
• Smugglers

Depending on the city, the cleaners may haul the waste to a combination of outside the city walls, into special alleys known as "waste streets," or into the street bisecting ditches if the city was one originally built by the Adrakian Empire that "flushes" out when the ditch-gates up the incline are filled with water, approximately once every hour and a half.

Regardless of how the streets are cleared during the day, the night street cleaners haul out the trash outside the city and into a pile of waste where farmers and the people in the city can acquire the decomposing soil for their own farm and garden use. When the piles are too large, a new waste site is designated and the locals continue to use the compost until there is either nothing left, or the compost hill has flattened down anough for a new one.

For walled cities, street cleaners become a weapon of defense providing the defending forces with the delightful projectiles to throw at the attackers. While not the greatest weapon in the arsenal of the defenders, waste matter making its way into injuries or soft places like eyes, ear, mouths, or noses, can provide a means to reduce the number of attackers - in the long run, or long enough for an archer to take aim while the other tries to clear themselves of the feces from an entire city.