The Warehouse Ch. 2 & 3

Chapters 2 & 3

Chapter 2 is quite short, so I’m bundling chapters 2 & 3 together.

Chapter 0102

Word Count: 979

Time Allotted: 03 Minutes 56 Seconds

Setting: Gray Courtyard

Some have it that The Story of the Singing Selector is an Orphean myth, albeit with missing parts. Where is Eurydice, for example? What it does share with the old Greek version is a talented musician traveling into the underworld. However, some versions tell of him not going underground, but up into the ceiling, and there is the tricky matter of the song. It seems to change with every telling.

While there is no music foreign to the aisles of The Warehouse, where one is as likely to overhear from the next aisle an old folk song from Mexico as a parody of a Disney tune (A common one, borrowing its melody from The Lion King, goes something like—

In the Warehouse, the dreary Warehouse
We all work till we die...

—) and of course, always popular, is the pop song performed in humorous falsetto, or there is the less creative option of singing along with whatever happens to be playing on the overhead speakers at the moment, but The Song of the Singing Selector is always an original number, and tends to take aim at the teller’s idea of depth. This sometimes means a song of longing for a past life, a time before The Warehouse, as with Song #1:

I am down in the box mine
Picking up boxes—
How did my life come to this?
I once had a wife, some land, and a daughter.
How did my life come to this?
The drought choked the sky,
and gave us no water,
the crops all withered and died.
We held on a-while,
but our debt, it did pile
Eventually...we had to sell.

Well, Mister Butt came to town
said that he needed men to go down-into-the-ground.
Said that he’d found a vein,
a vein full of boxes…
boxes and boxes,
an army couldn’t cart them away.
So I signed up my name,
and boarded the elevator
that goes straight into the earth...

[spoken] and I am still down here today.

That is my story,
It is the saddest I know, and I sing it all alone.
I am down in the box mine,
Picking up boxes—
How did my life come to this?

The mine goes for miles...miles and miles—
I have wandered from my home,
following the box vein,
pursued by the whip,
driven by a need for dough…
...Oh I’m down in the box mine
picking up boxes—
How did my life come to this?

Perhaps even more common are the songs that aren’t a longing for the past, but for an alternative present, not a time before The Warehouse, but a time without it, as in Song #2:

I could dream of a better world
I could do it quite easily
but dreaming is for sleeping
moving boxes is for me.
I’ve moved a billion boxes,
for a single billionaire.
When I stop to think…
But no, they warned me life’s not fair.
And whose got time to think,
when life is a fight for air?
Each month I seem to say
next month I can breathe easy
just gotta spend this paycheck
a bit more in-tel-ig-ent-ly
can’t be buying that six pack
can’t go out to eat,
shouldn’t eat at all,
just go to sleep.

[Chorus] O-ho, homeless man, you won’t get a dime
O-ho, homeless man, it’s about time,
for you to get a job
so you can be like me
another functioning piece
in a happy society.

In fact, alienation and time are frequently on the mind of The Singing Selector in the multiverse of myth, which makes sense, as he must, too, be wearing a computer on his wrist that traps him in a precise matrix of time limits, controlling not only the pace at which he works, but forcing him to hold his bathroom breaks for the short fifteen minute reprieves from the endless march forward.

Song #3:

Are you going to be the moonlight in some man’s cave,
or are you going to be the moon?
Why wake up and seize the day
when we could stay in bed till noon?
I may have nothing intelligent to say
but baby I can sure spoon.

I’ll never live a life that’ll light the world
or die a death that’ll stop it.
Sometimes I wonder what this life is worth
if I’m not even the one in the cockpit,
but, baby, I don’t give a shit
as long as I have you,
so tell me…
[repeat]

Whatever the true song may be (can there really be a true song, or is truth remade with each telling?) does not much matter. It is the song that somehow opens the route to the other world, over or under, though many of The Warehouse’s religious can comprehend of none other than the three-layered metacosmos, with heaven on top, earth sandwiched in the middle, and hell at the bottom...

“Given that is even true, I imagine an ascension from any layer to the one above would make that one heaven, and vice-versa.”

“You’re saying Earth could be heaven or hell?” asks the other night selector, spinning the styrofoam cup in hand and watching the coffee within swirl.

The first shrugs. “I’m saying it’s all about perspective.”

“Okay. We will put a pin in that for now. What’s it got to do with The Singing Selector?”

“I’m just saying, up, down, left, right, it doesn’t matter which way she went. She goes to another world. The direction she took to get there has no effect on the world in itself.”

“And now The Singing Selector is a she?”

“Who is telling the story here?”

“You are, but you’re getting everything all wrong.”

“How can it be wrong? It’s a story!”

“Well I ain’t listening anymore.”

“Come on; don’t be like that.”

“It’s not that. My break is over.”

“Shit! What time is it?”

Chapter 0103

Word Count: 5371

Time Allotted: 22 Minutes 52 Seconds

Setting: The Warehouse

Besides the wrist-mounted computers, the most important piece of technology for a selector is the Barrett, the vehicle upon which selectors are situated in order to travel around The Warehouse and collect boxes. Each Barrett is differentiated by a six digit number across their plastic hood. They are parked in a large garage known as the Barrett Room and allotted on a first-come-first-serve basis. Barretts are in no way created equal, and getting stuck with a bad one can doom your numbers for the day, so it is common for selectors to arrive in the Barrett Room long before the start of shift in order to lay claim to one that doesn’t suck ass.

While the mechanics of the machine are rather simple, there are a few malfunctions that can spell catastrophe: The forks may not lower once raised leaving you high and dry with a fully loaded pallet stuck in place, meaning it has to be deconstructed and restacked on another pallet, and a new Barrett must be picked up from the garage, all while time is ticking. The weight sensor can mess up, meaning the Barrett won’t move or stop moving unless you’re standing in the exact right position. It may not walk, a function that is particularly useful when an assignment presents many picks on a single aisle and being able to push the Barrett forward without having to board it each time is more efficient. Of significant importance is the horn. There are many blind corners, and hundreds of selectors, most of them young men under enormous amounts of mental and physical stress, flying about on two-ton machines. Only a boldly blown horn gives one the right of way, so it is preferable to find a Barrett with a good, strong one.

And, of course, there are more Barretts than battery charging stations, which means that not every one will have received a charge since its last use. One wants to ensure their Barrett is as close to fully charged as possible because a trip to the Battery Man for a battery swap in the middle of a shift eats into precious time. Not to mention that all the aforementioned malfunctions become more likely with each decrease in battery percentage.

Jakko is among the first to arrive in the garage as it is his final shift of the week, and he is selecting for his job. His numbers are dangerously low, and if he doesn’t have a great day, he will dip beneath the mandatory 95% and be let go.

He browses the long line of parked Barretts, eyes jumping first to their battery charge, and second to any names they might have been given. Historically, selectors who stick around long enough grow affectionate over certain Barretts, grow, let’s say, a little attached, and often demarcate a favorite with a Sharpied nickname across the plastic battery cover. Or, equally as common, a selector may come to despise a certain Barrett and wish to both insult it and steer others away by giving it a slanderous title.

Nimbus 2000’s a smooth little ride, Jakko knows from experience, but it’s too fast out of the gate, which is a real bitch on wobbly stacks, and Jakko’s stacks are nothing if not wobbly, so he moves onto the next: Slow Walk, left uncharged overnight. In turn, he rejects Lizard King, Mr. Miyagi, Grave Digger, George Costanza, and Shoggoth, before settling on Pacman. He sets his belongings atop it, thereby calling sacred dibs, and heads to the cafeteria to fill a styrofoam cup with bad coffee.

Jakko sips his coffee while watching the commuters trudge in. He made his way through college by working as a barista, and developed a bit of a snobbery, but in the years since he has had to learn to accept Folgers (and its equivalents) when it is free and much needed after another night in a hammock.

At times, he has sworn to himself that, from that moment on, he will only drink coffee when he has the time to sit back and truly enjoy it, not bad quality stuff either, and never on the go, but, as with most promises one makes to oneself, it never lasts long. Check your privilege, you jackass, he thinks as he chugs the weak swill.

The majority of the selectors tend to prefer energy drinks over coffee. There is a vending machine that serves Red Bulls and Monsters, and the food trucks parked in the courtyard hawk Bangs for twice their gas-station-going-rate. These Bangs are all the rage, but Jakko can’t stomach them; that is, he can’t stomach the thought of stomaching one. He could do it ironically, but without the appropriate audience, irony seems pointless. Besides, We are what we do ironically, so we must be careful what we do ironically.

“Good morning,” George Gilman, floor manager, says more loudly than the garbled response he receives from those gathered before him, so he wrinkles his bald brow, gives a little grin, and shakes his head.

“I said, Good Morning!” he repeats, and the selectors parrot with clearly faked enthusiasm an acceptable response, and George moves on. Jakko dreams hungrily of a morning where they all clap their traps shut in solidarity and George is left looking like a fool.

Truly, he is not sure what the managers want from them. Do they have a need to believe their employees are happy to be here, and, if so, why? In order to appease their own conscience? Can they not just accept the job is miserable and each and every one of them is only here for the paycheck? That is the truth, and shalln’t the truth set us free?

The performance is repeated each morning in the Barrett Room. The floor manager of the day gives their speech, often reading from a sheet of paper that they have clearly received from their own boss, or maybe from some vague corporate bureaucracy. The hierarchy above the floor managers is shrouded in mystery. Either way, the manager listlessly goes over safety procedures, wishes happy birthdays to names they cannot connect to faces. Sometimes a pep talk is thrown in. Sometimes they take a guess about whether it will be a long day or a short one. Once, George quoted Martin Luther King Jr., the bit about running if you can’t fly, walking if you can’t run, crawling if you can’t walk, just keep moving forward, in what was surely meant to be an inspiring fervor, but which fell flat. In the end, the managers wander off to their office and a trainer takes over.

Trainers are easier to accept than floor managers. They were once, and often quite recently, selectors who were good enough at their job that The Company promoted them to a position off the floor in which they take a number of new trainees under their wing and teach them the ways of selecting. Unlike floor managers, there is little to no stench of corporate phoniness on them.

One of the trainers steps forward to lead all the selectors in team stretches. Afterwards the trainees disperse into groups, five-to-ten man units under a single trainer, while those who have graduated from the training program go off and begin their day.

Then it is the trainer’s turn to ask his students how they are feeling. The difference here being that they often receive actual, honest responses:

“Like dogshit.”

“Like I was hit by a truck.”

“Like dogshit that was hit by a truck.”

“Still waking up.”

“Sore as hell.”

“Is it time to go home yet?”

At which the trainer laughs kindheartedly at the new and creative descriptions of the well known feeling, and partially out of relief that they no longer have to wake up feeling that way themselves, and then they sparse out whatever advice they can, usually something along the lines of: I know it sucks, but we’ve got a day off coming up.

The meetings typically last no more than five minutes as their true purpose is to give the faster veterans a chance to get out ahead of the aisle-clogging mass of newbies. Only if a floor manager is loitering nearby do the meetings last longer, at which times trainers silently plead with their trainees to ask a question. Attentive trainees who are loyal to their trainer will do their best to come up with one so as to make them look good in front of their boss.

During team stretches, Jakko feels the coffee loosening his bowels. He curses his luck, decides to try and hold it until the morning break so as not to harm his percentage for the day, but realizes he will never make it three hours, and darts for the closest bathroom where he flings open a stall and gets his shorts down and ass over the bowl just in time.

By the time he is emptied out and cleaned up, the trainees are just boarding their Barretts, so he gets caught up in the heavy morning traffic. He can’t even get into the aisle where his assignment begins and must wait for some space to clear, all the while he feels his allotted time eroding beneath his feet. His mood deteriorates quickly as his stress builds. He tells himself getting fired would be a blessing. After all, he has never been more miserable than this job has made him, but then he remembers his student loans, his car payments, the health insurance he only has because of this job, and a sweat breaks out across his thin back, showing through his gray shirt in patches.

Finally, he enters the aisle and begins throwing boxes down in a panic, but he can’t move forward because there is a wall of trainees up ahead. Frustrated tears burn in the back of his eyes as he feels completely trapped.

What if I have died and this is hell? he has wondered on more than one occasion. The thought expands, radiates within him until he is operating in a yawning emptiness over which The Warehouse itself could be turned, dumping all its endless boxes into the depths without filling.

Slowly, he passes the trainees, one at a time, until finally he has broken free, but he’s been moving at such a panicked pace that his stack looks horrible. It threatens to collapse at the slightest bump, but he pushes on, trying to make up for all the lost time, until a corner of it does collapse and he is forced to rebuild. Only then does he stop, lower his forks, move forward to give himself some space, and then wrap the shaky foundation with plastic until it is sturdy enough to stand on its own. Of course, in doing so, he has given a number of the trainees he managed to pass earlier the time to get ahead of him again, and he must fight his way through for a second time.

By the end of the first assignment, on which he gets an 89%, Jakko is emotionally exhausted and in a horrible headspace which seems to expand the three hours between start of shift and first break into an unending nightmare, but first break eventually does arrive, and he’s managed to pull his numbers up into the acceptable range, but only just. A single difficult assignment could still wreck everything. Jakko trudges into the cafeteria and sits down at his usual table where Big Bucks is instructing a baby-faced stranger.

“One box at a time. Just put it down and move along. Don’t overthink it. Just remember, there’s nothing to do but to do it,” he is saying as the kid listens as if Big Bucks is some sort of guru. The newbies are all drawn to him, Jakko thinks jealously.

“Jakko, this is my friend Javier. We used to work together. Well, he used to work for me,” Big Bucks adds on teasingly, “back in our pizza slingin’ days.”

“How’s it going?” Jakko asks meekly, already reaching for his phone.

“Javier? No, no. That won’t do,” Arizona says.

“What do you mean?” Javier asks.

“Do you think Arizona is what it says on my birth certificate?”

The kid shrugs.

“You need a Warehouse name.”

“What’s your real name?” he asks Jakko.

“That is my real name. Jakko.”

“How about Robin?”

“Robin?” Javier asks, a grin slowly growing on his face. “Like Robin Hood?”

“No, I mean like Batman and Robin, but I changed my mind. Ay, yo Meme, come here a minute!” Arizona calls out. Meme takes a seat, all wiry energy and big darting eyes. “Meme, buddy, we need a name for this kid. You’re the best at that sort of thing. Now, a little bit about him: he used to work with Big Bucks.”

“Once, when I was his manager at Pizza Palace,” Big Bucks says, already failing to suppress his laughter. He is unable to compose himself and instead holds up a finger and begins scrolling through his phone’s photos until he finds the one he is looking for. It is a selfie of Javier, evidently taken in a closet, as he is framed by hanging clothing.

“He sent me this picture and said he was going to miss his shift,” Big Bucks manages eventually.

Arizona picks up the phone, laughs, and asks what happened.

“I went home with this girl after school. She said her parents wouldn’t be home till late.”

“And you thought you could squeeze in a quickie before work, you dog,” Arizona says. Javier grins sheepishly and shrugs.

“Turns out, her mom got home right after we did. She was this super religious woman, and she would have flipped if she knew I was there, so I had to hide in the closet until she went to sleep.”

Now everyone, even Jakko, is laughing, which attracts a larger audience.

“For how long?” Arizona asks when he is able.

“Oh my god, dude. Tell me she snuck you some food from the dinner table and slid it into the closet.”

“Actually, she did.”

This revelation leads to another howl of laughter, and the group grows even more. The photo is passed around to those who arrived late and a quick synopsis is provided, but then Javier is goaded into just starting the story over. When the tale is complete, and the group has dispersed, Javier finds himself immediately elevated to folk hero status, and Meme has arrived at a name:

“Milhouse,” Meme declares.

“What’s that?” Milhouse asks.

“Meme has spoken!” Arizona says.

“Rise, Darth Milhouse,” Meme giggles spastically.

“What, he’s from Star Wars or something?”

“Noooooo!” Meme screams, falling to his knees and lifting clenched fists towards the ceiling. The cafeteria goes silent as everyone turns to see this new attraction, but, recognizing it’s just Meme, shifts back into gear. Meme pushes himself up to his feet and darts away.

“That guy alright?” Milhouse asks.

“He’s got a few, er...let’s call them communication issues,” Big Bucks answers.

“The guy can only speak in references,” Arizona clears up. “Hence the name.”

“Huh,” Milhouse says. “Weird.”

Meme has provided many a warehouser with their sobriquet. No one can remember a time before he was here. He is one of the elders, those few poor bastards doomed to never be promoted off the floor. He could never be a trainer, not because he cannot stack at pace, but because he could not teach others to do so. Still, his opinion is given much weight, and in the schism amongst the workers as to whether or not they should officially change the nickname of Slenderman, highest most of the floor managers, Meme stands on the side of the raggedy veterans who’d come up with the original name years before, saying he does not get the reference in response to those who want to rebrand him as The Duke of Boxes.

“It’s not a reference. Just look at him. Doesn’t he look like a duke?”

Meme looks at the guy, more aged and sullen than the other floor managers. Pale gray as Tiny Tim coated in lunar ash with cheekbones that are so neatly aesthetic they can’t possibly be load-bearing. Meme imagines something else within the man’s face keeping it erect, extra set of tendons stretching from his forehead, the pulleys straining to remain taut as age demands they slacken. Clean shaven, always, and dressed in either gray or a dusty navy blue, never seen in the cafeteria during lunch, seen only rarely on the floor, never participates in morning meetings, only appears behind you in an aisle, as if a blade of evil that has been beamed to the surface to watch, just watch...There are rumors he is to be promoted soon, to corporate or something, and the warehousers, including the lower managers, are holding their collective breath for that day to come. However, there are other rumors that posit he is a shapeshifter, so one must take all Warehouse rumors with a grain of salt.

Call him Slenderman, call him The Duke of Boxes, or in some variations The Duke of Boxshire, but whatever you call him do it in a whisper, and check over your shoulder first.

---

Jakko’s half-completed assignment is in the aisle where he left it before break, so he scoops it up with the forks and moves onto his next pick: dog food, batteries, cheez whiz, baby food, glue, Barbies, animal crackers, bug spray, lighter fluid, fire wood, printer paper, beans, canned pineapple, laundry detergent, Hot Wheels, cereal, coffee, pudding, soap, shaving cream, tooth paste, energy drinks, nails, soda, candy, potting soil, soup, pickles, vinegar, oil, The Warehouse contains all.

One at a time, he stops, lifts, and stacks, but his mood continues to deteriorate. After break, it is in free fall. More black coffee on empty stomach was a bad combination. The caffeine just becomes stress. His movements are twitchy. He is sweaty and overheated and can’t possibly escape the task at hand.

Sometimes, Jakko wants to wear his attitude on his face. He wants a floor manager to see how miserable he is, for them to know what they are doing to him, but what would be the point of that? Then the boxes win. If he can stay cheerful despite whatever the boxes throw at him...then the boxes still win.

Moving down the rows, adding slowly to his stack, he has nothing to do but think. He tries to work faster to avoid thinking because thinking in such a mood is a dark thing. He is visited by shameful ghosts, memories of his past. There is a Walter Benjamin quote that lives in his head: Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience, and the job is nothing if not boring. Eggs hatch on the daily, giving birth to new regrets which burrow hollows in the dead wood of his soul. Mostly, he thinks of people and his failures with them, past lovers, old friends, long neglected family members. Jakko’s never known a relationship that isn’t stunted. He lives too much in his own head.

If only they could see me now, he thinks somehow vaguely.

At times, he has looked at this job as some sort of penance, as if he is here to pay a debt for his sins, that such labor has the power to scrub him clean. In his time moving up and down the aisles, he has come to the conclusion that while forgiveness comes from others, it is unnecessary, whereas redemption can only come from within. It is redemption he craves, but redemption for what? He’s not evil. Just sort of...empty?

(If I cannot be a pure light (and I can’t) then I am glad to hide myself away here in these warehouse walls: a note he jotted down in his phone while swinging high above The Warehouse in his hammock.)

But it’s not hell, it’s not penance, he’s not even a particularly bad person. He is just bad at being a person. The world doesn’t make sense to him. People don’t. He has a college degree, but no idea how to use it, no real interest in any career fields, no hobbies, no skills, no specialized knowledge, and no ambition. He has a general intelligence, perhaps, and had always been told he had potential, but for what?

As Jakko grows increasingly irritated, he strongly considers parking the Barrett and walking out, but reminds himself how difficult it was to find a job in the gig economy, so difficult that he’d settled for this one. If he lost it, how much further might he fall?

One must imagine Sisyphus happy, Jakko repeats to himself.

Had he walked out then and there, he would not have been the first. Not by a long shot. There is a constant influx of new employees to replace those The Warehouse breaks.

Jakko’s first week, sitting in heavy traffic in one of the narrow aisles where passing is impossible, the guy in front of him had two stacks, both nearly seven feet tall, and each wobbly as hell, and still he was adding boxes to them. There must have been a dozen people behind him, and many of them were honking and yelling. They’d already announced there were no more assignments to give out, so everyone was eager to finish the one they were working on and be done for the day, but the guy was holding up the line. For each box he added, two tumbled down, and he would be forced to stop and add them back in.

When he attempted to add a particularly heavy box, it brought down an entire column of his stack. Jakko jumped off his Barrett and rushed over to help him, but the guy pulled over to the side, climbed into the shelves among the boxes, and waved him on before laying his head down and weeping. Jakko squeezed through the opening between the abandoned Barrett and the shelf, praying he’d fit without losing his own stack. He never saw the guy again.

At times, Jakko has felt he, too, might break. In those dark periods, he tries to remind himself that it doesn’t matter. That it’s just boxes, and then he imagines not quitting, but instead moving at a snail’s pace, so slow that his numbers would garner the attention of the higher ups and he’d eventually be called into the floor managers’ office, which is up some stairs in a glass nest above The Warehouse, and be forced to explain why he wasn’t hitting his numbers. For just that situation, he has already prepared a script:

Interior. Floor Managers’ Office. Day.

Floor Manager: So, Jakko, we see you are well short of your target. Can you tell us why that is?

Jakko Gerhart: [Sarcastic as hell] Well, you see, the percentage is based on how quickly you are able to complete an assignment, and I suppose my numbers are too low because I am not completing my assignments as quickly as I am supposed to.

Floor Manager: [With phony HR patience] But can you tell us why that is?

Jakko: [Beginning by mimicking the phony HR patience and slowly descending into a mad rant] Sure can! We are under an enormous load of stress out there. Both physical and mental. Do you know what it feels like to have your every move tracked? Now, it has always been my dream to move boxes, I mean ever since I was a little boy, I always hoped and prayed that this system would not give out before I had the chance to feed its immense gluttony. I wanted this cheap decadence to go on, so that I would have the chance to stack crates of cheez whiz for the people. I used to write about it in my diary as a boy, but as I got older I became terrified that this society we have created, when we could have done absolutely anything, mind you, I mean think about it, we could, and still can, make our society into anything at all, there are no rules, but I am just so glad that we created this precarious system that demands endless, unfulfilling work by the majority of its citizens because in a different kind of society I wouldn’t get to move fucking cheez whiz all day, and then what would be the fucking point?

By the end of the monologue, he’d be foaming at the mouth, up out of his chair, which would be on its side on the floor, but of course Jakko never gets the chance to perform what he has rehearsed. Instead, the day drags unchangingly on. Lunch is much less eventful than first break. Third break is much the same as lunch, and then they enter that uncertain time between the end of the last break and the end of the day. On rare occasions, it is a blip: thirty minutes or less. More often, it lasts another two to three hours, sometimes more. It all depends on the number of trucks for the day and how fast the selectors are moving.

Jakko is right where he needs to be, but he can’t afford a bad assignment, so of course he downloads a huge one as soon as he returns from final break. Head down in determination, thinking only of his hammock, he heads towards the stack of pallets, loads a pair onto his forks, and then heads to the first aisle three buildings away.

Two aisles in, moving at a steady clip, his momentum is brought to a sudden halt as a lift operator whips out in front of him and blocks the aisle. There are far fewer lift operators than selectors, but they tend to strut the aisles like upperclassmen, and are granted right-of-way in all scenarios. Unlike selectors on their Barretts, who can only snake up and down the one way aisles, lift operators can move in any direction they like.

This one comes up the wrong direction and stops about fifteen feet ahead of Jakko and another selector who he doesn’t recognize, a trainee who is fumbling awkwardly through his assignment. The LO blocks the aisle with his huge machine and everything grinds to a pause as he raises his forks up and up and up. Jakko cranes his neck and reverses another few feet as a fully loaded pallet is lifted upon the forks fifty feet over his head. He’s seen loose boxes crash to the floor from such heights with enough velocity to crush a skull. The trainee keeps moving forward, selecting boxes and tossing them onto his bulging stack. It is truly an awe-inspiring sculpture: an avalanche suspended in time. Jakko doesn’t understand how it remains upright.

The trainee nears the LO as the LO stares from his high throne down at the trainee who spills several small boxes from his pick slot across the aisle. Halfheartedly, he kicks them over to the side, and the LO looks slowly at Jakko and then back at the trainee who seems to be only just noticing that there is a huge lift with its forks extended blocking the way.

“You gonna pick those up?” the LO asks.

“What?” says the kid.

“Those boxes you dropped. You gonna pick them up?”

The lift operator is old enough to be the trainee’s father. He continues to bring down the pallet, and when it is finally at ground level, Jakko knows he could wave the selectors past before continuing, but instead he keeps them trapped as he drops it in the aisle, reverses his forks out from underneath it, and swivels towards an empty pallet situated in a pick slot. He moves forward, situates his forks underneath it, swings it out, places it beside the new pallet, reverses again, and swivels back to the pick slot, pushes the forks further in, lifts the reserve pallet, pulls it out, places it atop the empty pallet, reverses, moves over to the new pallet from the rafters, lifts it, swivels, puts it in the place of the reserve pallet, reverses, swivels, lifts what was the reserve pallet and places it at the front of the pick slot, reverses, swivels, lifts the empty pallet.

Typically, after all this, the lift operator would zoom away. They are on a schedule at least as tight as the selectors’ own, and receive their own daily percentages from their computers, which are not mounted to their wrists, but to their lifts. This one, however, is in the middle of an altercation, and does not move, not even out of the center of the aisle so that Jakko can shoot the gap.

“You know, I don’t think the managers would be very happy if they saw you running over those boxes you dropped. That’s costing The Company money.”

“Come on,” the kid pleads. “I’m just trying to select here.”

“So you’re not going to pick them up?”

“No, man. I don’t have time!”

“No need to yell. I was just asking you a question. Goddamn, you can’t tell kids nothing these days.”

“I’m not a kid, man. Will you just get out of the way?”

The lift operator, again, slowly turns his head to Jakko with a willyagetaloaduvthisshit grin on his face. The trainee also focuses his gaze on Jakko, looking for a veteran selector to come to his aid, but Jakko looks down at his Barrett’s handlebars.

“What’s your employee number?”

“Why, you going to tell on me?”

“I’m going to report you to a floor manager, yeah.”

The trainee tells him. “Now will you get out of my way?”

“Gladly,” the LO says with a smile. He pulls his machine to the side of the aisle, Jakko’s side, and the trainee moves slowly through. Jakko cuts hard to his right and follows him, passing under the high gaze of the lift operator. He overhears the trainee sniffling as he selects and finds himself searching for something to say. Failing to think of anything, he moves as quickly as he can to get into the next aisle and away from him.

They have not yet announced that all assignments are out, but everyone knows it is near. Those with large assignments are moving quickly so as to be as close to finished as possible when the announcement is made. Those with small assignments are dragging, so as not to finish before the announcement and be given a fresh one.

Jakko is moving along at a brisk pace, tired but desperate, and somehow he finds himself stuck between the two crowds. Ahead of him are a pack of trainees, lugging along their seven foot stacks, Milhouse among them, still slogging through huge assignments they received hours before. Behind him are those veterans like Arizona who fly through every assignment and now have the small dregs saved for the end of the day, but they are holding back. Talking and joking amongst each other, but because they have less picks per aisle they are still slowly gaining on Jakko who feels their presence and pushes himself to go faster. They are one aisle behind. When they reach the end, they will turn and be on the same aisle as him. He watches them through an opening in the racks. Their movements are swift and fluid. There is no waste in what they do. They have been doing this for so long that it is thoughtless, memory embedded in muscle, transcendent.

We carry the hours on our backs
Box after box swallowed by our stacks
We carry the hours on our backs.
Here come The Warehouse veterans,
so move aside, hacks!

Jakko does his best to stay ahead of them. There is no beauty when he is pressed to such speed, and still they close in on him, even as his newfound pace brings him in towards the slow-moving newbies ahead.

“I will be crushed in between the two, and there is nothing I can do about it!”

Finally, twelve and a half hours after the start of shift, the announcement is made: “All assignments are out!”

Suddenly, the veterans push into the next gear and Jakko is swallowed by their ranks. They move through the aisle like a plague of locusts, devouring boxes, and then disappearing, leaving those behind them in a daze, fighting for whatever is left.

When Jakko does finish his assignment, he flings some wrap around it and hightails it to the shipping bay. He waits as his W-MC calculates his percentage, but is almost too afraid to look. Whether he still has a job or not is right there on a tiny glowing screen on his wrist.

He looks and loosens a deep sigh of relief.

[Exit music]