Monday. On the Line. With Donuts.
Adam, the Preload Safety Coordinator, greets me at the entrance to the Hub with coffee and donuts. There are worse ways to arrive at work at 4:00am. I wonder for a moment what kind of omen this might be. It’s easy to be skeptical about employer provided Dunkin Donuts first thing on a Monday. “Have a donut– and good luck cramming those 5,000 packages into your trucks. Moohoohahahaha…!” Or maybe coffee and donuts have some elusive relation to on-the-job safety? Hey, it’s a union shop; you never know.
I punch in and make my way to the Line. I’m running on 3 hours of sleep, so I manage to fuel up on the coffee and donuts by the time I reach my package cars. My cages are running lighter than usual. Again I’m thinking, Bad Omen. The cages are color-coded and crawl along a track opposite the rear doors of the package cars. Each cage has three tiers. Each tier corresponds to a group of package cars. My cages are “bottom tan.” Every few seconds one passes by my three trucks– named Trai, Pier and Riop– filled with packages for me to load. On an average day, it’s all I can do to pull two-thirds of the packages before the next cage arrives. Today, I’m having no problem keeping my cages clean on every circuit of the track. I assume that means I’ll be swamped around 7:30. We always get busiest right after break when the Albany and Hartford trucks arrive.
My supervisor is out. His replacement for the day arrives from another line. I don’t catch his name, but I come to think of him as Mr. Greenshirt. He tells me he was a loader for 5 years before he recently became a supervisor. I wonder how it takes anyone 5 years to become a super in this place.
Greenshirt lets me know that a load of 140 boxes is on the way for one of Riop’s stops. The boxes start to appear in my cages just as the words come out of his mouth. Each box is about 36″x18″x12″, maybe 50 pounds each. “Man, those are not all going to fit in my truck,” I note for the record.
“Well, I think they split the load with another truck,” he counters.
“70 of of those are not going to fit in my truck.”
“Just fill up the aisle,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”
“How am I supposed to get to the shelves?” which are still mostly empty at this stage of the game.
“It’ll be fine,” he tells me. 5 years as a loader, after all.
Greenshirt leaves me to the battle. One of my cohorts, Justin, comes over. He’s wearing a custom t-shirt in the company colors that reads Least Best Employee. He is, in fact, the Zen master of package car loaders. “What’s the deal?” he asks.
“70 of these.”
“No fucken way. Won’t fit.”
“Told him that already.”
“Fucken idiot!”
Justin starts pulling from the cages while I hustle the packages into the truck. Within minutes, we have the package car loaded stem-to-stern, floor-to-ceiling, but the boxes keep coming. Greenshirt returns to check on our progress. “Truck’s blown out,” I explain; jargon for “stuffed to capacity.”
Greenshirt takes a peek inside the package car, says, “Oh, that won’t work fellas. There’s no room to move in there. How’re you gonna get to the shelves? Unload some of those– clear out half the aisle.”
Justin and I exchange mutual eye rolls. “What are we supposed to do with the extras,” I wonder.
“Just set them aside for now, along with any more you find in the cages.”
So it goes. I start unloading the truck while Justin squeezes a flatbed into the gap between our sets of package cars. We pile the remainder of the load onto the flatbed, and the boxes will remain there for the rest of the shift. While this drama has unfolded, my cages have become swollen with cargo and, suddenly, it’s just another Manic Monday.
Greenshirt comes around every 15 minutes or so, and I remind him about the overflow sitting on the flatbed. He assures me that he’ll “get right on it.” I get caught up loading my package cars: Trai and Pier are relatively light, but Riop has become a lost cause. Toward the end of the shift, when there’s absolutely no room left to maneuver inside the truck, I start throwing packages into whatever gaps I can find. It’s a complete logistics meltdown. I just hope I’m done before the driver shows up and gets all weepy about the mess inside his package car.
We’re finishing up. Last cage is called, and Greenshirt is taking another stroll down the Line. “You tell Dave about those extra boxes?” he asks.
“I told you. Several times. And who’s Dave?”
“Right,” he replies. “I’ll get right on it.”
I wash my hands of the mess and head for the timeclock. I punch out, and Greenshirt catches up with me on the way out the door. “I just wanted to say how awesome it was to see you guys in action today.”
Say what?!
“I mean, Line One has got the heaviest pull and everybody always says how incredible you guys are. But to actually get to see it. Amazing. It’s been a real honor.” Greenshirt is completely earnest, like he spent the last 4 hours holed up with Easy Company at Bastogne in the winter of ‘44.
Me, I thought it was a slow day.