Katherine Poyner-Del Vento never equated being a mother with a garbage truck, but on Wednesday she couldn’t help but acknowledge some similarities between the two job titles.
She was at the City of Nanaimo public works yard with her son Nathan for the unveiling of winning entries selected from an online contest to name the city’s new automated garbage trucks, one of which was named Mommy.
Poyner-Del Vento said Nathan chose his own name for one of the trucks and Mommy for the other.
“I hit submit and I forgot all about it, because you know, he’s four and people who are older will come up with much more clever names and I sure thought one of them was gonna win,” she said.
That was before she was informed by the city that Mommy was one of the names selected among the finalists.
“I just started laughing because I hadn’t thought it through. I hadn’t thought it was a realistic possibility that it would be chosen and that I would have a large, smelly garbage truck named after me … a few people said to me afterwards, you know, moms do run all over after their kids and pick up all day,” she said.
Hudson Holfeld, 2, successfully tagged the second automated garbage truck Trash-O-Saurus Rex, named with a little help from his mother Andrea after a visit to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta.
“He lost his mind there. It was awesome, so we started talking about all sorts of dinosaur names and he likes Trash-O-Saurus … with a little help,” Andrea said.
Both boys were toured through the trucks and got a chance to hop up in the cabs and blow the vehicle’s horns before they were each presented with new toy garbage trucks by the truck’s drivers.
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