I don’t know jack
Watching a really good pallet jack operator gives the same kind of pleasure as watching a skillful ice skater. There is the same ease, efficiency and grace. Watching me use a pallet jack, on the other hand, is more like watching somebody wobble and jerk on skates — you just hope nobody gets hurt.
But let’s back up a bit. When I arrived at the warehouse to begin orientation, nobody I had interviewed with had returned, not even Clifford, who I was sort of looking forward to observing at greater length. There were eight other guys, all between perhaps 18 and late 20s, making me, at almost 40, the old man of the group. We were photographed for ID badges, then led on a long trek through the bleak concrete block corridor, past the warehouse door, along a catwalk, down another hallway, through a ghetto of office cubicles and into a conference room to fill out paperwork for an hour and watch a workplace harrassment video.
Next up was a safety movie, in which I learned the meaning of the huge banner hanging in the warehouse, which reads “Slam the job.” As every industrial safety educator knows, acronyms are the key to avoiding injuries and the resulting workmen’s comp claims and lost productivity. In this case, it’s “SLAM”: Stop, Look, Assess and Manage. The goal of SLAM? ALARP: As Little As Reasonably Possible. Uh, as little what? As little danger, apparently, or injury. Maybe the acronymists need to tinker with that one a little. But watching a surveillance camera video of a forklift catching on one off the steel racks and falling down with its forks raised high drives the point home: with all the heavy equipment rolling around in there, it is very possible to get hurt.
When we were interviewed, we were told we’d have to wear steel-toed boots, and were given a sheet telling us that without them we wouldn’t be allowed to start work. After the movie, the night shift manager, who had taken over from the HR rep, told us about checking to make sure new hires have steel-toed boots, or “steels,” as he called them. He asked if we were all wearing steels. Everyone nodded. He said in just about every group of new people there’s somebody who doesn’t have them, and asked again if we all did. Everyone said yes. He told us that at one time the company was consolidating training of workers from several facilities, and he had about 80 people in a group. Usually he checked guys’ boots by pressing on the toes with his thumb, but one this occasion he decided to take a slightly different approach. As he began his spiel about steels, he had a 3-pound sledge hammer in his hand, and said he would be checking boots with it. He asked if everyone had steels on, and everyone said yes, so he began going down the line of people, giving everybody a whack on the toe with his hammer. Clang, clang, clang, down the row, until he got to one guy and the hammer hit regular leather with unarmored toes underneath. He looked up, aghast. “You said you had steels on!” he said to the fellow, who, although in pain, offered to take another whack with the hammer to “prove” that he was ready to work.
Again the manager asked us all if we were wearing steels. Again everyone said yes. So we proceeded out of the conference room and down a long stairway, at the bottom of which he had us each pause on the last step, where he tested our boots with a press of his thumb. See where this is going? Yup. One guy wasn’t wearing steel-toed boots. Jesus Christ.
(He had to go and try to find a pair within an hour, or repeat the orientation process another day, from the top. He made a trip to Wal-Mart and came back.)
At last it was time to get into the warehouse and get started learning how to drive pallet jacks. Our instructor was not, let us say, born to teach. After not really teaching us how to go through the required nightly equipment check, he went on to not tell us how to operate the jacks, after which we each individually tried to negotiate a figure eight around some cardboard tubes in an empty area of shipping dock. It was a little like learning an arcade game that doesn’t provide instructions — you just fool around until you start to get the idea.
I had used a small manual pallet jack before, but these are 1200 pounds with nothing on the two-pallet-length forks, maybe 3000 pounds loaded, powered by massive 24 volt batteries and capable of going perhaps 15 miles per hour. They are steered with a handle that sticks out in front of the deck where the operator stands, and have a throttle on the handle, like a motorcycle, that controls speed forward and backward. Buttons control the raising and lowering of the forks, a “rabbit button” puts the jack into overdrive for fast cruising, and the machine can be braked by pulling up on the handle. A jack is capable of a very sharp turn, but it takes a while to get used to the pivot point and to learn to lean into the handle with the body instead of trying to crank it around with one’s arm. Too sharp a twist on the throttle, and the jack can lurch abruptly.
Some of us got the hang of it more quickly than others. I was clearly among the less gifted in the group. It was a bit like learning to drive a car with a bunch of spectators on hand — embarrassing.
The rest of the evening we spent cruising around the warehouse at random, up and down the aisles, getting a feel for the machines and starting to get acquainted with the building’s layout.
Partway through the night we reconvened for a tour of the freezer warehouse, where three of the nine of us would be working. Although it is a separate building, it is connected by a long enclosed ramp with switchbacks, which we drove in convoy on our jacks. The freezer warehouse is a lot like the regular grocery warehouse, except for one crucial difference: it’s cold. It’s really fucking cold. Entering it, I immediately felt like I had progressed toward one of the inner circles of hell, where everyone is grimmer, more desperate, toiling in a state of resigned misery. One the other hand, the freezer guys make an extra 25 cents an hour. That’s enough for a gum ball.
By the time we knocked off at 1:30 a.m. I was knackered. My cold was still getting worse. The next day we’d start our regular hours, ending the shift at 5:30. I went home to sleep.
