For residential pickup you deal with the company directly ? Always had public pickup, although half the city is private but they are contracted out to the municipal government. Not even sure why the city went with GFL, other than obvious corruption, public pickup has been ok for me, 10 years and maybe 5-6 issues during that time and nothing colossal (they collected the trash the next day most of the time).
Spending my day working in Excel. So...more crushing boredom than usual