Heads-Up Robot Cycler Was Two Days Late For Recycling Talk Because He Had To Get His Head Together

Cycler had a very important appointment in Coeur d’Alene on Tuesday, but it was canceled after calamity struck.

His body arrived in Coeur d’Alene headless after his noggin mistakenly had been shipped by Federal Express to Seattle.

But by Thursday, the recycling robot had been reunited with its head. He rolled into Ramsey Elementary School without a problem to honor third-grader Katie Barber for her prize-winning recycling poster.

“Congratulations, Katie,” Cycler said in his tortured, squeaky voice - the result of electronic distortion, not decapitation.

Out of sight in the school hallway, Steve Roberge of Waste Management spoke through a small microphone and manipulated a joystick, rotating Cycler and lifting his newspaper-lined arms.

Handling Cycler is one of the more lighthearted tasks of being operations manager at the waste-hauling company, but it’s not without its stressful moments.

When Cycler’s head didn’t show up for Tuesday’s appointment, Roberge quickly had to arrange for a possible stand-in - another Cycler, one of 50 clones owned by the megalithic Waste Management corporation.

The plastic machine, with its belly of pop bottles and and its ears of crushed aluminum cans, is an enthusiastic crusader in the recycling movement.

“He’s been all over the world,” said Roberge proudly. “Everyone knows Cycler.”

And who says machines don’t have emotions?

During a short lesson on the virtues of recycling, Cycler became distraught, taxing his battery pack, when he observed, “When we use things, we just throw them away. That’s a real Cycler no-no!”

With a little, close-lipped smile, Katie accepted her award quickly as Cycler whirred, his eyebrow twisting dementedly over his flashing blue eyes.

Katie’s poster shows the North Pole occupied by children on one another’s shoulders, holding up a gigantic phone book together. It’s designed to promote the annual phone book recycling contest sponsored by GTE and Waste Management.

After the visit was over, Katie posed for photographs with Cycler, draping her slender arm over his broad, post-consumer plastic shoulders. Cycler flashed a grin in his mouth of lightbulbs.

Today, Cycler is scheduled to visit last year’s winner of the phone book recycling contest, Canyon Elementary School in the Kellogg School District.