Interest in Trash Trucks?

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I was watching a story on my local news about a four-year-old, nonverbal autistic boy who began to speak because he had an interest in his neighborhood trash truck. The boy later had a "language explosion" and made friends with the trash truck driver. This story was in Roanoke, VA.

http://www.wsls.com/story/22931588/trash-truck-driver-helps-4-year-old-talk

20 minutes later, NBC nightly news aired an identical story where all the facts were the same, except it was a different boy and the story was in CA.

http://dailynightly.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/25/19682764-autistic-boy-breaks-his-silence-prompted-by-the-rumblings-of-a-garbage-truck

I googled it and there were at least a dozen of these recent stories about autistic children and teenagers and trash trucks.

I'm wondering if this is some kind of weird disinformation or if there really is something special about trash trucks.

If anyone is interested in trash trucks, would you mind replying and telling me what it is about trash trucks that you like?

As a kid I LOVED trash trucks as well as all other kinds of trucks and heavy machinery. We lived near a highway that had road construction every summer and I would get my mother to walk me down there to watch the belly-dumpers - not trash trucks, but a kind of dump truck - for hours. The men who drove them wore coveralls and I had a child-sized pair we'd found somewhere that I called my belly-dumper-driver suit. I'd have worn it every day if I'd been allowed to, and in fact occasionally had meltdowns when I wasn't allowed to wear it.

In answer to your question, I don't know exactly what it is about the trucks that fascinates me (to this day I love them) but it might have to do with them being big and powerful and having complicated inner workings.

I wasn't obsessed with trash trucks as a kid, but I was obsessed with the ROUTINE of the trash truck. The day and time the truck came, I had to be at the window to watch the guy do his work and then watch him get back in the cab, and he ALWAYS waved to me. I craved that routine every week.

I'm interested...in keeping my distance from trash trucks. Not the best of smells in the world.

Not trash trucks however when I was 5 I had a special intrest in graders, Champion graders to be exact as our small town used one to clear the roads of snow, I spoke on time and never made friends with the driver though, I also feared the grader thinking it(driven by the driver) would come on the sidewalk or with the plows wing to run me over(I walked to school at 5 years old all alone!) yet I loved watching it drive around, drawing pictures of it and playing with all the grader toys my folks somehow found for me, I don't know I just remember how excited I was when my Dad came home with a book of brochures and calenders from the Champion company as unknown to me the people he worked for were a supplier for the local dealer/maintainer, I spent weeks reading them. I still have all of them.

Hm...thanks all!

I'm wondering if it's just normal for ANY child to be into trash trucks or heavy machinery and these stories are popping up because the media likes to highlight what appears to be "emergence" from a child's "ice tower" or whatever the expression is. I'm NT, but I enjoy the sound of any interesting state vehicle or machinery. But if I was abnormally interested in these things as a child, I don't think the news would do a story on me because there was nothing "special" about me.

I'm going to keep reading up about this. If anyone else has thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

I and 4 others at age 5 made the front page of the small town newspaper for fundrasing money for a heart and stroke charity, in a small town anything can be considered newsworthy. It appears meny here had/have the train special intrest, I had this and used to stand at the local rail yard for hours to watch when I was 12 and under, when I was about 7 I got to drive a train in the yard thanks to a friendly engineer who in hindsight likely knew I hung around there alot as did a few other adults. For the railfans on here wondering what I drove it was a couple of CP Rail EMD GP38s, I have also spent a half hour or so of time in the cab of a CN SD40-2(my personal favorate engine).

I think the reason the stories became news is becouse of the improvement in the severly disabiled child, a typical pity story, not the abnormal intrest by itself therefore disqualifying all the stories told here aside from the linked ones as news worthy, there is no pity to be had in a werid intrest alone. I suppose if I had been diagnosed and disclosed and a reporter had been around the train driving story could have been twisted and spun into a decent news story however, the fact is it was just a nice person giving an intrested child a chance to have a little fun, no pity to be had there.