Certainly, I can have my opinion and you can have yours. But unless you know something personally about the employees and/or the residents shown on the show, then I highly doubt you can claim to know the absolute truth. A recent Time article reviewed the show and found it to be full of BS as well. I'm going by what I saw in the show and what I know about how people typically acknowledge their trash men. Even if a special needs person decides to be, well, special, and have a pre-written note, what are the odds that she does it on the exact day that a film crew is following her? What are the odds that her supervisor/manager happens to choose her truck to follow on that same day as well? I mean, I'm sure she's not the only truck that the company has, and unless they're picking up trash for Mayberry, they have a decent number of trucks...yet hers just so happens to get supervisor surveillance that day?
While it is a decent show, it reeks too much of emotional cheesiness for most of this not to be set up in some way. We didn't see your average worker who's angry about his job and his pay, doesn't like his supervisors, doesn't enjoy his job, etc. We saw the guy who was on dialysis three times a week, the woman who was going to have her house foreclosed on, the COO's special needs daughter, etc. Afterall, do you think the COO of Waste Management is going to allow them to come on television and show the angry employees who barely do their job and resent their supervisors and superiors, including Larry O'Donnell himself? No. They want to paint a happy picture where employees are happy about their job, everyone respects the work that is done, everyone shows them their respect, and in the end everything works out.
I may not be a trash man, but I've worked in a variety of jobs, including factories and the food industry, and that is just not how the real world works.