As I type into the terminal at the warehouse “job center,” I curse quietly. The keyboard seems to have been designed to infuriate anyone who is used to typing: the keys are strangely spaced, and there are extra keys taking up some of the space normally occupied by the shift keys. Some keys — the tab, for instance — tend to stick. When I try to advance to the next field, the cursor races down to the bottom of the application form.
I hope this is not a sign of poor ergonomics to come.
After reviewing the descriptions of available jobs, I decide against “slot cleaner,” mainly because it sounds like some kind of degraded sex slave. I also decide that it isn’t worth working at -20 degrees F in the freezer warehouse for an extra 25 cents an hour. So “grocery selector” it is. I file my electronic application form and go home, but not before taking a look around the room. What catches my eye is a prominent sign warning prospective employees that fighting is grounds for dismissal, unless the other guy starts it.
I couple days later I get a call from Colby at HR, asking me to come in for an interview a 1 p.m. on Monday. I decide to think of cheese when I think of her, in order to remember her name. Subsequently, I find myself going through a series of cheeses when I try to recall it: edam, gouda, camambert…
When I arrive at the job center on Monday, there are three other guys waiting. Evidently we have all been called for 1 o’clock. Soon a hard-bitten-looking woman in a rabbit fur jacket joins us. When an HR person tells her to have a seat, she tells the rest of us in the waiting room, “I’m too nervous to sit down.” It’s been a while since she’s had a job interview, and the pressure is getting to her. She paces.
Meanwhile, a young guy with a crew cut and bad skin, sitting near me, announces to the room that it’s uncomfortable waiting in here. He speaks in a slow, thick monotone, gazing straight forward.
“I hope I get this job. I’m technically homeless. I got no money.”
I make the mistake of meeting his gaze when he glances my way. Now the monologue is directed mainly at me. Clifford, as I will learn he is called, was in St. Johnsbury. He had hoped to get to Bennington, but his bus voucher only got him as far as Brattleboro, and he was loathe to hitchhike “over the mountain” on Route 9. Besides, as he said, he had no money, so he decided he’d better stay and get a job. Clifford is 23, and last had a job when he was 19. That job was at a grocery store; he was fired for stealing beer. He had been through a “faith-based teen drug and alcohol recovery program” three or four times, but wasn’t getting much out of it. Somewhere along the way he served 18 months in jail in Rutland for “burglary, larceny, arson — little stuff.” He mourned the Patriots’ loss in the Super Bowl, and said if he’d been playing for their opponents he would have played a little sloppily, to let them win.
Someone had asked me recently if I thought I was too good for work such as the job I was seeking at the warehouse. No, I explained, it’s not that I think I’m too good. I think everyone is too good. Clifford was tempting me to reconsider my position.
After a substantial wait, we are each brought individually into the HR office for an initial interview.
“What do you think are some of the main causes of accidents on the job?” Robyn asks.
Working when tired, working when hammered, dropping things, I say.
“Good. How can you avoid accidents from these causes?”
Be well rested, sober, and keep a grip on things. And wear the right shoes, in case you do drop something on your feet.
She likes that last part — steel-toed shoes are a requirement of the job, as I had surmised after noticing the sawn-in-half steel toed boot on display.
“How would past employers describe your work ethic?” Robyn asks.
Excellent, I say, which turns out to be just the answer she was looking for. I’m acing the first interview.
Soon it is time to put on an orange vest and go on a tour of the warehouse with the other applicants, after which we will have a second interview, with a supervisor.
The route to the warehouse takes us through concrete-block corridors lined with disheveled, windowless rooms, some with a chair or a table, some empty. I feel like I am entering some CIA black site for interrogation. The warehouse itself, though, is awe-inspiring, in a other-worldly, sci-fi way: 450,000 square feet, with palletized grocery items of all kinds stacked ten or 12 tiers high. What light there is filters down through space from the distant ceiling, cold and bluish. It is something like being on the floor of a rainforest, where the sun’s rays scarcely reach the earth — or it would be if rainforests were made of steel racks, the earth were concrete, and the sun were a fluorescent tube. Detergent, Chex, ziplok bags, canned beets, ballpoint pens, potato chips, lightbulbs in immense quantity crowd the long corridors of the gigantic rooms, an unfathomable cache of familiar supermarket commodities. Eight- or ten-foot long motorized pallet jacks zip past us, honking, most driven by young men who are either serious or just tired. They lean into the curves, traveling at surprising speed. Bill, our guide, explains that the job is like grocery shopping: we will get a “shopping list” and travel around the warehouse filling our “cart,” and then go the “checkout,” where our groceries will be loaded onto semis and brought to Big Y, Stop ‘n’ Shop and other destinations. It is tough work, Bill told us, and we can expect to lift 1500 cases per shift. After our training period, if we are fast, we can earn a little more per hour.
Clifford is pumped. He has been talking almost non-stop throughout the tour. Mostly I have ignored him, but I catch him remarking that something smells like beer. Back in the waiting room, awaiting our second interviews, he keeps saying, “Bring it! Daddy’s here! Bring it on!
It has been explained that all of us, if hired, will be a “team,” working together during our two-month training period. This means I will be seeing Clifford again, unless he gets canned for stealing something.
During the second interview, which is with Bill, I am asked what I would do if I saw a “dangerous condition or action.” I say that I would report a dangerous condition to the person responsible for the area in which I found it, and in the case of a dangerous act, I would speak to the actor.
“I like it,” Bill says, scribbling a note on my interview form. It seems I am winning him over too.
Sure enough, Bill congratulates me and says he is able to offer me a job, provisionally, contingent on my passing a drug test and physical screening, for which I must return the following day.
The adventure is afoot.
