A Corporation of Hamilton trash truck worker who slapped a 16-year-old girl for poking fun at his job was fined $2,000 in Magistrates’ Court.Michael Pond, 43, said he hit the girl “in the heat of the moment” because he felt she had disrespected him.Pond was arrested after police came across the teenager on Church Street, holding the left side of her face and nursing a bloody lip.“We were working and she walked across the back of the trash truck with her friends and said the ‘trash truck stinks and you stink’,” Pond told the court yesterday.“I said ‘young girl, watch your mouth’. She said ‘your momma’s p**** stinks like the trash truck’.”Pond said he struck the girl after she continued to taunt him and ignored his warnings to watch her language.He was arrested shortly after the incident on June 22 and admitted the offence to police immediately.When questioned, Pond told officers: “I just lost it, these young people are too rude”.Pond, of North Terrace, Pembroke, told the court on Wednesday that he regretted the episode.“I was wrong. In the heat of the moment I lost it. When the police came I admitted my wrong. I cannot take back what I had done, I was wrong,” he said.Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner said he understood Pond was provoked but reprimanded him for resorting to violence.“You are doing a job, which causes you to interact with members of the public.“Every time you do not like what is going on you can’t take your hand and slap people’s children,” he told Pond, before fining him $2,000.“People nowadays can’t even hit their own children when they are rude and disrespectful so we have to stop this cycle of violence, that is what it is.”