Welcome to Warehouse

Floorworker

I thought: I like taking pictures. Facilitating the fulfillment of others’ image-making could be an honest way to make a decent living. It’s tangential to my interests at best, but at least I could feign interest, more so than at the interview with the editorial department of the luxury magazine with photo spreads devoted to yachts and undiscovered villas, articles about cigars and the risk/reward ratio of contemporary art as an investment. I showed up to complete a paper application at the recruitment office downtown where a man with sixty-year-old skin shuddering underneath a twenty something’s wardrobe glanced at it briefly with an artificial glimmer in his eye before hiring me on the spot, contingent on fingerprinting, background check, and drug test. He directed me back out into the dim hallway, declaring that each room would be clearly labeled. The space outside the Recruitment Officer’s room felt lifeless but for a few framed images too small and closely concentrated relative to the scale of the corridor. In an attempt to get a close look I had to stoop down. They hung at chest height, and my body cast too much of a shadow to make out what was pictured. I wasn’t confident they weren’t paintings, abstract renderings of foreign textures. I thought I had stepped outside of the sightline from his desk, but I heard the man’s voice again before I saw him emerge through the open doorway.

“Just lovely, aren’t they? It’s a wonderful operation you’re joining, I think you’ll find it quite rewarding.”

Satisfying Requirements

The first room was where he said it’d be, legibly announced by a simple placard. I encountered no other doors along the way, though I was hoping to find a bathroom. I reasoned they wanted me to save my urine for their purposes, though they wouldn’t need it until the third door. I’d have to hold it a while, hopefully not too long.

Fingerprinting was straightforward: there was a small taupe box with a wire snaking out the back, off the padded mat on a table in front of a wall made up of what I assumed was two-way glass. The scanner’s cord ran through a hole in the wall at floor level. There was no instruction given, but the device was fairly intuitive, emitting a pleasant synthetic chime and vibration after each digit I offered. It was disappointing to find it unattended, as I remembered the intimacy of my last background check, the stranger officiously manipulating my hand against the instrument, hasty but tender. After the last finger, my right pinky, the device sounded its satisfaction with special enthusiasm and then appeared to power down, all lights fading out, the lifelike buzz stilled. In that moment I was relieved to have all of my fingers present and intact, wondered what someone like my co-Habber Taimy might do, lacking as they did a finger on their right hand, as well as the entire other hand. Perhaps an unseen operator behind the wall would override the scanning machine defaults, accepting fewer than the normative quantity of finger scans, in Taimy’s case merely four. Maybe such applicants wouldn’t have made it this far, would’ve been screened and dismissed by the recruiter. Surely there were positions that required less fine dexterity. Certainly, there were also other-abled people more than capable of performing the Essential Duties. There hadn’t been any statement of expected physicality in the position’s description, nor was there any claim about non-discriminant hiring practices. The listing had been vague on this and many other details.

I took a squirt from the hand pump nozzle on a five-gallon jug full of what I assumed was sanitizer, working it over each fingertip, then into my knuckles and webbing, briefly covering myself with isopropanol stink before it evaporated. When I emerged back into the corridor, I became aware of how long it had been since I was last exposed to natural light, suddenly felt myself in a tunnel. Looking back the way I’d come, I could see the clump of frames on the wall about a hundred paces away. Turning to continue on my original trajectory, I noticed red numbers glowing from the face of a digital clock mounted to what must have been the wall at the hall’s terminus. I couldn’t make out the time.

The background check room felt further from the fingerprint room than the fingerprint room had been from the recruitment office. Previously I had only registered a vague brownness beneath me, but as I examined my steps, I realized that the carpet had once been red with a flat pile, still slightly shiny on the edges by the walls, as if intended for a parade of celebrities. The middle was so worn the floor felt rutted like I was stuck in a track and might not be able to turn out. This was silly, of course, the deviation couldn’t have been more than a few fingernails’ widths. Though it was gradually deepening.

The trodden path forked into the open door where there were three silent, eyeglassed faces peeking out over the top of large terminals oriented side by side in a wide semicircle. An audience for the performance of my innocence and aptitude. I looked from one to the next, unable to see their full bodies, waiting for them to guide me further. They each met my eyes before flicking them downwards toward the floor in front of me. There was a small X marked out in black tape in the middle of the room, a stage spike, somewhere something big might fall. I stood on it.

They began to interrogate me on the particulars of my life, each in turn, switching from the obvious details of my employment history (name of a recent supervisor: Gunst Parloc), mundane personal questions (most common breakfast meal: oats), and invasive details about my intimate relationships (how often I fornicate and with whom: rarely, and only ever the one, and I wasn’t comfortable providing their name, hopefully that wouldn’t be an issue.) Their only reaction to each response was to consult their terminals, presumably logging and verifying veracity.

Their voices were indistinct, without recognizable accent, steady tenors. They sounded like me. I was nervous they’d ask challenging questions, ones I wouldn’t know how to answer, things of extreme specificity, but their queries mostly concerned recent events, things readily accessible to my memory. When I was only able to give a partial answer, or if I had to concede that I didn’t know, couldn’t remember, there was no follow-up, no deviation from the questioner’s terminal entry coinciding with the subsequent questioner’s continuation of an unrelated probe trajectory, for they each were adhering to their own theme, though shuffled by their tag-team rotation.

My unease gave way to reassurance, my confidence gradually growing with each neutral acceptance, each passable answer, and I began enjoying the simple satisfaction of being asked questions and having the capacity to respond. I’m not very private and haven’t often had the chance to encounter people all that curious about me. Even if their interest was perfunctory and professional, I couldn’t help but feel flattered. This did eventually give way to fatigue, and as hard as I tried to resist, I became snippy. I was nearing the limits of my capacity to silence the complaints of my bladder. It also didn’t help that as if in reaction to my increasing sense of ease, the third questioner, the rightmost one, began to keep after details whose relevance to the job or insight into my reliability or reputation I couldn’t perceive. To go from maternal grandmother: Ednah and preferred mode of transportation: pedal to greatest number of continuous days a single outfit was worn without washing was jarring. The mental effort required to consider whether I could remember an occasion where I’d gone longer than normal without changing was painful—wasn’t accessing some store of facts—but forced me to relive each period of hardship in my past life, to quantify the difficulty, to compare them knowing full well that any answer would provide cause for them to judge me harshly. Even as I accessed these memories, I knew it was more detail than I had learned would be required, that a simple “maybe thirty-seven days, give or take” would suffice, that even an honest-in-its-own way “I’d like not to revisit thoughts of such occasions” would likely be permitted, the damage had already been inflicted. I’d been thrown.

Place of residence at the time of most recent natal day: The Habituary nearest Gurgleke Lake. Any pets: not since Sintito escaped after eating her mate and newborn offspring last solstice. If forced to dismember an acquaintance, discarding without consequence all but one limb, which limb would you leave and where would you hide the rest? I could not suffer this. I didn’t even not know. What? No, I told them. Just no. For the first time since we’d begun, more than the eyes of the operators became visible. Their heads tilted upwards toward the ugly drop-ceiling tiles, their eyes closed as if in uncontrollable laughter. They emitted no sound, though their lips did curl into smirks. The pesky one eventually regained its composure, entered something into its terminal, and said to me, Ok. Ok. You may go.

Back in the hall I resumed my progress down the track, kept a brisk pace, eager to relieve myself. The last door, the room where I understood I’d be able and required to do so, looked at least as distant as the other rooms were behind me. The interior spaces defined by the rooms I had been in didn’t seem to merit their spreading apart unless there were other rooms with concealed entrances, or perhaps accessible from another parallel stretch of hallway. Maybe they were confined quarters directly reached by dedicated staircases descending from above, maybe they were empty pits or simply unexcavated earth. My hurrying kept me from observing very much, but I did glance up at the now piercing brilliance of the red clockface digits, quickly averting my eyes. Seared into my vision were three pairs of numbers separated by colons. I blinked rapidly and the dots and lines faded. They had been counting up.

I’ll spare you the details of the last pre-hire requirement hurdle. Clean for four hundred and fourteen days, as my Taimy could and would attest should they be contacted, I had no anxiety about the results, barring the possibility that another co-Habber had been drugging me in my sleep, which thought had crossed my mind given how competitive The Hab had become, but I pushed the unfounded suspicion aside. Just know that there was no commode to speak of, rather a canted floor with a wall-length drain for collecting, and I’ve never felt freer.

Re-emerging, I saw the clock, or rather, the stopwatch, with clarity, bathing the entire stretch of hallway with its harsh, decolorizing glare. Some seconds tallied up enough to reset, incrementing the minutes, which I saw were now at 59, preceded by zero zero hours, followed by zero zero, then zero one seconds. Had it been that long? Sensing it would be a relief to escape the corridor before seeing a whole irretrievable hour of life pass within it, that to fail to do so may constitute failure of some unspoken evaluative component of the hiring process, corporeally lightened, I sprinted toward the red, intuiting that there would be stairs to the side, and there were.

Logistics

News of my hiring was waiting for me when I returned. Taimy had left a note tucked into my sleepsack:

                  well did.

                          start tomorrow.

                                      listen to the tape.

So I did. “Congratulations. I’d like to be the first to tell you: Welcome to Warehouse. We’re delighted for you to join our family. When you arrive, by whatever means, make sure you do so on time, and that you clock in promptly, no more than 5 minutes before the scheduled start of your shift, nor a single minute after. Each tardy minute will be subtracted from your union-mandated break, and once your union-mandated break is gone, each 15 minutes you are late results in the forfeit of 1 hour’s wages already earned. Note that we do not have secure accommodations for vehicles of any kind, nor storage for personal effects.” I paused playback, having not thought this far ahead, imagining for the first time the logistics of going to this place every day, the reality of spending most of my wakeful life there. The whole experience so far had been so impersonal, even though the voice on the recording sounded nothing like the recruitment officer, I pictured him speaking to me through a puckered, pointy mouth.

“The nearest public transportation center lets you off at the end of Warehouse Way, where you’ll come to our gates.” This landmark and street name were unfamiliar to me. I suspected my earlier visit to the downtown corridor had been to a satellite facility, with the actual work taking place elsewhere, beyond these gates. I rummaged around, looking for the clipping on which the job listing had been printed, circled by Taimy with a thick stroke of ink. It was in my pile, beneath a folder full of my official documents, on top of a stolen issue of Distinguished Individual, the luxury magazine I’d tried and failed to trick into employing me. I read it through, thoroughly this time.

Floorworker Needed

Floorworkers are to tend to the machines, ensure quality is within established standards, and perform the following Essential Duties:

• A variety of pre-fill and post-fill packaging tasks to include: Container Staging, Labeling, Carton Forming, Boxing, Inspection and Palletizing.

• A variety of tasks associated with filling such as: Fill weight determination, Manual and Automatic Filling, Closure Application, Bagging & Inspection.

• Basic batch processing, vessel cleaning, charging & operation.

• Waste water-processing activities.

• Housekeeping, safety, and environmental practices.

MINIMUM FORMAL TRAINING, LANGUAGES, AND ABILITIES:

• Must be able to read, write, and speak.

• Multitasking and flexibility/versatility.

• Intermediate terminal skills.

• Ability to obtain and maintain company fork truck certification (sit-down and pallet jacks)

• Must be able to wear a full and/or half respirator along with the required PPE.

Continually hiring on a rolling basis. Visit our Recruitment Facility at Fifty-seven Central in the Downtown Industrial District. This is an entry-level post at our corporate campus facility, One Warehouse Way.

This confirmed that I hadn’t been where I would need to go. I assumed Taimy would know where it was, he must have had some prior knowledge, some familiarity to give him the notion to refer me. Nobody else I knew worked there. Very few co-Habbers had gotten this far, most were still trained on stabilizing. Of course, those who had entered the workforce ahead of me had all moved on, graduated to dwellings in proper neighborhoods, or else regressed, back in the pen or dead. I didn’t know any of them. I resumed playback.

“After you present your state and employee identification cards and pass biometric screening, you’ll be permitted entry to our grounds. You’ll be invited to take a voluntary collection kit home with you, allowing you to furnish us with blood and urine samples, which will grant you access to expedited entry so long as you provide us with refreshed fluids every fourteen calendar days. We advise that you wear comfortable shoes, as the trek to your post at our facilities is long and gravelly. Unfortunately, no motorized vehicles not issued by us are permitted on the premises. Again, welcome. Without your efforts at this facility, fulfillment efforts across the region would come to a halt.” The recording ended there.

Desensitivity Training

Taimy was able to help fill in some gaps the next day, monologuing while expertly navigating the roads with just a thumb and pointer pinching the controls. “A photo falls out of its envelope, you pick it up off the floor, don’t go looking at it. But when you look at it, try not to figure out where Body Part A detached from Body Part B, nor how. Don’t bother identifying limbs. Try not to see body parts at all.”

I wasn’t aware that Taimy was so familiar with such labor, but then again, there was a lot that I didn’t know about them, other than that they seemed genuinely invested in my betterment.

“Having a wage opens all kinds of opportunities for you. Don’t blow it all on orange sodas and snack packs. You’re not ready for romance yet, Hab-wise, but you should be saving up. You’ll be doing important work.”

“Put your headphones in! Listen to your Lil Whoevers, do whatever it takes to stay on your feet and out of your head. I’m proud of you. Just make sure your hands keep sorting, and the days will fly right by.”

He pulled up to the gates, suggested I make a friend, and drove off.

Certifications and Credentialing

In the secure booth adjacent to where the thick wrought bars would separate sat a weary face creased by so many forced smiles, piled high with frizzy hair that had wanted a bit more attention in the morning but was understandably neglected given the early hour. When asked for papers I unslung one shoulder of my backpack to swing around and rifle through. It was packed full with reams of official self-documentation, I had brought everything just in case, but as I considered it all through the eyes of authority, most of it suddenly felt trivial. Nobody here would care to see my comms license, tool library card, long-expired Medikit certificate. Correctly assessing the difficulty I was having locating the particular form of identification requested, the guard began to suggest other acceptable methods of verification.

“No State ID? National Identity Card would work too. CAC, Common Access Card? If you had a Warehouse Primo Maxcard, I’d actually be able to accept that, but I know it’s unlikely. Why don’t you just give me what you’ve got.” I hoisted the bag up through the sliding glass window into beckoning hands, entrusting all evidence of my worldly existence to an exhausted but cheerful stranger.

“While I look through this, why don’t you look over here,” the guard pointed at a spherical wide lens camera mounted on the window frame, “and read this into the mic,” the guard tapped the shallow ledge on my side of the glass onto which a sheet of paper had been sealed beneath overlapping layers of clear packing tape. The print was large, lines generously spaced, and the text broken into simple phrases, which I recited aloud, glimpsing the electronic eye between sentences when taking breaths.

“This is Warehouse.” There were no chimes or confirmation indicators, but I continued.

“I am here to work.”

“I will do as told.”

“Rules apply to all.”

“This all checks out,” the guard confirmed, rendering the sack back into my possession. “There was some miscommunication, they just changed the process, you’re supposed to’ve got this badge before, but I have a few left over from the old way.” The guard handed over a medallion bearing an insignia that seemed to convey authority I didn’t feel qualified to bear.

In my flustered state, I’d failed to notice the man who’d arrived behind me by unknown means of conveyance, beaming with a cheesy grin surrounded by a wiry orange beard. He was about twice my size, though some of that bulk could’ve been layers beneath his faded blue workman’s coveralls. Hanging low from straps in his hand was a matching duffel bag, on the side of which was a plastic sleeve encasing a small card bearing an image of his face, unsmiling and official-looking there next to the corporate emblem. The man tipped the bag up towards the guard with a slight bend of his knee, not bothering to present it for closer inspection. The guard nodded, and as the gate swung open for us both the bearded man thumped me on the back with his free hand before extending it to my far shoulder, steering me in.

Amenities

“Nothing more full of promise than a fresh start, a new day,” he told me. After a few steps with him weighing on me, I began overheating and pretended to fiddle with my backpack clasps in order to shake him. His breath was vaguely acrid, thinly masked by something minty.

“I’m Odenvald. You must be excited. Just paper in that bag? That’s ok, you’ll be pleased to know the vending machine’s prices are competitive, but with the added convenience of being on-site. Tomorrow you’ll remember to bring something. But don’t you love it when food comes to you? If you think we’re missing a particular snack or beverage, the suggestion box is by the tackboard in the corner of the breakroom. I can’t say if or how often the box is emptied and read. I also cannot say what that smell is in the breakroom, what kinds of things people might be doing in there to cause it, how anyone could create such a stench within fifteen minutes. I won’t show you that room, and I won’t, I couldn’t attempt to describe the smell, you’ll just have to trust me or else see for yourself.” He laughed as a cue to me that it was meant as a joke.

The guard hadn’t given me the sample collection kit for future expedited entry, eager to have us move along, but the grounds were as rough as had been promised if not worse. The paved road from outside extended just a few feet past the gate before transitioning briefly to dirt, then the aforementioned gravel, which gradually gave way to jumbled riprap. Stunted willow and cottonwood sprang up from beneath the rocks and grew increasingly dense, funneling us into a loosely defined path clear of growth, nonetheless requiring each footstep to be placed with care. I desperately wanted not to show up to my first day with a sprained ankle, couldn’t imagine I’d be able to win a workers’ comp claim before ever even clocking in. I didn’t get the sense that this time in transit counted as officially on the job, and there was no familiar punchcard system at the gate, so I assumed there were further checkpoints to come.

Odinvald was incurious, asking no questions, more interested in orienting me, not to our surroundings, but to the job.

“You’ll be on sorting to start, it’s a good intro, you’ll be a whiz.” He described the finger prophylactics I’d want to avail myself of to prevent cuts, the high traffic lanes painted on the floor to stay away from to avoid being crushed, the emergency PA announcement codes to know in case of hazardous spill or explosion.

“It’s really not as dangerous as it seems.”

I made an incoherent joke about running out of space on a “____ days without an accident” sign, and he took his attention away from the rocks below to give me a quizzical look and then laughed, seemingly more at something he thought than at what I’d said.

“You’re a weird one, I like you, you’re gonna fit right in.”

The scrubby growth surrounding us receded, but there was still no sign of a big building. The air was oddly still, my posture inexplicably bracing for impact of wind, water, some forceful element. I knew the outskirts were sparsely developed in general, but I was surprised there were no visible landmarks in the distance. Rocks as far as I could see, which admittedly wasn’t that far, and the sun-bleached grey of the ground merged indistinctly with the low clouds on the horizon. Surely this facility needed to be connected to the various resource grids and infrastructure, I couldn’t imagine how else the machines would run, how they could get any sizeable shipments in or out.

“Heads up!” Odinvald warned. My legs had grown accustomed to the terrain, and in trying to orient myself, I’d stopped methodically locating each stride. Beneath me, inches in front of my leading foot, was an open manhole, from the bottom of which shone a dim light. Any brighter or darker and it would have caught my attention from farther away.

Odinvald dropped his duffel by his side and began to strip. Beneath his coveralls were grey suit slacks and a blazer with broad padded shoulders and reflective hi-viz silver lapels, onto which were pinned several ribbons and other decorations made from indeterminate materials.

“Impressive, right? You want help clipping your little chicklet, or are you just gonna fidget with it all day?” He stuffed his coveralls into his bag and tossed it silently down the hole before plucking the medallion from my hand, barely grazing my palm flesh with his own soft fingers. He confirmed my currently outermost layer would remain so before skewering the breast pocket flap in and back out in a horizontal line.

“Sharp. Real sharp. Taimy told me you’d be well-suited to our operation. After you, I insist.” I unslung my backpack and dropped it down, expecting its weight to produce a discernible noise, but it didn’t.