National Geographic Channel will highlight the dirtiest job ever in new season of ‘Taboo’
There are people who have “dirty jobs” in the workplace, and then there’s Peter Majerle, director of communications at Minneapolis-based DuAll Services, Inc. The company, which will be featured in the upcoming season of National Geographic Channel’s successful Taboo series, has capitalized on the economic recession by offering a unique and disgusting service.
When homes need cleaning, normally after they’ve been foreclosed upon, DuAll is assigned to identify the problem, clean up the mess and haul off the garbage to a dump. But these aren’t just candy wrappers and soda cans. The filth includes just about everything imaginable, including human and animal feces.
It’s a grade-A yuck session, but Majerle and company are happy to provide the service. After all, someone needs to do the dirty work.
“There’s no such thing as a run-of-the-mill case,” Majerle said recently during a phone interview. “The vestiges of the previous homeowner’s personality remain in each of these houses, and the kind of detritus or whatever they’ve jettisoned from their previous life. So, every time we go into a door, it’s a completely new experience.”
The Taboo episode features a house that had multiple dogs and cats with “free reign of the place.” Compounding the problem was a sewer that backed up into the basement. Majerle cited it as one of the nastier jobs he’s done, but it pales in comparison to his two lowlights. One house in July 2011 had an unsettling amount of human waste in the bathroom (“a particularly stinky place to work”), while another home hadn’t received proper garbage pickup in five years. “Every single item that you or I would discard in a waste basket to be taken away, they just threw on the floor,” he said. “So when I walked in the front door, it looked like the light switch was right at my ankles. But that’s just because it was compacted garbage 3 ½ feet deep. … We had full suits and small particle masks. It was unbearable.”
Majerle explained that the vast majority of DuAll’s projects are owned by banks or real estate companies. Typically, the house has been foreclosed upon and the local municipality has found code violations. “Usually when it comes to the point where somebody’s living amidst all that stuff, their psychological state, they don’t want to share that with anybody,” he said.
DuAll is one of the few businesses that have found a silver lining in the economic recession. “This company changed its focus from being a fire and disaster restoration company for insurance … to being strictly a cleanout company about three-and-a-half years ago, simply because of the foreclosure crisis,” he said. “It created a new, almost unfortunate niche in the business world that we were equipped to take care of. So, yeah, the foreclosures, that’s what sustained us. And it’s grown the company … from about 28 employees to now 75 full-time plant staff.”
Each job takes no more than 72 hours, no matter how dirty and disgusting. “We walk through it, and we kind of develop a strategy: What do we need to get out first? We like to take out some of the bulk items, and then maybe have one or two crew members start bagging up or putting the junk in barrels. Then, work from top to bottom, and clean it out. It’s kind of an interesting process. There’s the tangible evidence of the benefits of hard work. You’re walking into a place that is completely strewn with the remnants of somebody else’s life, and then eight hours later there’s not even a nail in the wall left from them anymore.”
Some items are recycled, while others are donated. But most of the trash ends up at the dump.
The National Geographic Channel, which looks at DuAll Services among several other odd story lines in Taboo, followed Majerle and his coworkers with a close eye.
“When you get into a house that is as nasty as the one that we do on the show, we get in there, we suit up, we put on our masks, and it’s just go-time. We work like we’re John Henry, driving in railroad spikes to beat the machine. … It’s not a weekend in the spa.”
Currently, DuAll services roughly 1,100 properties in southern Minnesota, with hopes of expanding to western Wisconsin and northern Iowa. “If there is somebody who needs a bunch of burly dudes to clean out a bunch of junk, we’re ready to go,” he said.
Majerle came to the company after living in Costa Rica for a long time. In his previous life, he wrote travel articles and took photographs, so his additional responsibilities as director of communications came naturally when the company spearheaded a new blog that shows all the ins and outs of garbage cleanup. “(The owners and I) came to the consensus that this is a unique time in American history because of the economic crisis and the housing bust. But at the same time we are kind of the last people to see the remnants of the immediate results of that. … So we felt that it would be an interesting way to showcase our understanding of what’s going on. We don’t just go out there and do the job and then go to the next job. There is some reflection and, I would say, empathy for the people who have to move on in their lives to another home. And we kind of want to document this strange time because we’re at the forefront of it.”
Throughout all the smelly garbage and unsettling sights, Majerle tries to keep a positive attitude. “I actually volunteer for the nastiest jobs,” he admitted. “I see it as a personal challenge, much like a person (might) run a marathon or try to bench press 400 pounds. I see if I can just muscle through a poop house.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
I can’t wait to see the show. Bring on DuAll and Dirty Dave and Pistol Pete and the rest of the gang. Don’t forget the support crew back at the shop. Garbage and filth rule.