Warehouse: Songs and Stories

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

This isn't about Husker Du, this is about an actual warehouse. My warehouse. I don't really care for Husker Du that much. Black Lushus is invited to participate here, as is anyone else who spends 8-12 hours a day inside of a distribution center. I don't want any kitchen stories, or any of you retail fucks coming in here and gumming up the works.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

Judy is probably sixty years old. She works up in inspection for the modules, which means she stands next to a conveyor system, scanning UPC items with a scan gun and checking them against an invoice to confirm them, then sends the totes on their merry way off to shipping and to the customers.

 

In the past six months, she has volunteered enough personal information about herself to me where I could mock up a pretty formidable medical history of the woman. She has diverticulitis, and is high-risk for colon cancer, apparently. She recently missed quite a bit of work with an upper respiratory infection, also. Her daughter is married to some jerk who won't get a job. Why do you figure people tell me these things? I never asked.

[Black Lushus 0]

haha nice! I'll get a story or two on here when I get some time!

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

This one is going to sound like something from a TV show.

 

Up at the Ft. Wayne building, which is an offshoot type place for the parent facility to store things like extra totes, empty pallets, and pallets of really slow-moving product like Passover cookies and generic multi-grain crackers, there worked a man named Jorge. Pronounced George.

 

One day he was getting a pallet down from the racks when he jerked his forks sideways way too much to get the pallet around part of the rack. It then smacked into a pipe and knocked it loose. This was a gas pipe. I was over on the dock closing up a trailer when Jorge and three other guys are tearassing like their lives depended on it. Jerry, the supervisor, yells "Get the fuck out, Jorge's dumb ass just broke a gas line!" Nothing blew up. The fire dept and the gas company got things fixed in a fairly timely manner.

 

For those of you wondering how there could be a gas line in a trouble area like that, there haven't been corporate, health dept, or OSHA inspectors to that particular building in a good decade or so, considering we really don't store anything up there worth noting. There are rats in there at least a foot in length, and that's not hyperbole. One would pop out from some empty totes once in a while and try to bum a cigarette.

[Black Lushus 0]

we had to have OSHA come out because one of the managers nailed a beam holding up the mezzanine with a forklift...I myself took out a wood wall sort of thing with a riding jack.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

One of these?

 

 

I'm Steve McQueen on one of those fuckers. Fork-first U-turns at full speed and shit. They're pretty fun to drive, especially considering the lack of financial responsibility.

[Black Lushus 0]

yup, one of those...that was back when I first started riding one...some turns can be tricky depending on the cargo you haul around...people think those things are fun, every guy in the building wants to be trained to use one, but they can really work out your arms, back and legs if you're not used to using them on a regular basis.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I'm thinking the place I work is a little bigger than the place you're managing. We've got like eighty guys on those things ripping around with loaded pallets.

[Lord of The Curry 0]

More.

[Hawk 34 0]

You're making me miss my old much better paying job with your stories, guys.

 

Like Lushus and AoO, I will attest to the fun of a motorized jack. There's a difference in these from regular forklifts in that the jacks are lighter but not as flexible in width adjustments, which often forced us to stack items off the skids and directly onto the jack itself.

 

I never really bothered with the actual distribution. I went from basic assembly/paint to the front office.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

Tom is a supervisor. He's a sixty two year old biker with short gray hair and a goatee to match. His recent back surgery has resulted in about a 30 pound weight gain around the gut, and he walks poorly. His girlfriend, Ann, is thirty years his junior with a wiry frame covered in twenty pounds of fat. She has a decent figure but is completely unattractive with a really surprised look on her face constantly and a very defensive vocal tone in even the most mundane of conversations. They've both been warned about their behavior at work, so they tend to stay away from each other aside from work-related topics and the occasional passing comment. She dresses only in cutoff Harley Davidson t-shirts and denim shorts. Her face is aged beyond her years from mean drinking ex husbands and boyfriends and stepfathers. Crows feet and hair dye have come to stay in their gaudy outlandishness with her outfits for twenty somethings with better bodies, matching perfectly her sensible but fake nails. She works as a stocker; efficient with a box cutter, and quick to bend over to reach for things as younger men walk by and ignore her. She has about fifty keychains. Tom claims they fuck constantly, in graphic detail.

 

His history as a womanizing creep is unbelievable. Previously married for about fifteen years and recently divorced, he probably cheated on her no less than a thousand times with cocktail waitresses, lower-echelon strippers, and rough-looking young women at work. Anyone who would fall for the Harley angle. He's an avid biker. I once caught him up at a strip bar my first year at the plant, on my night off and very definitely a night he was scheduled to work but called in sick. We were celebrating my ol' bud Beaster's 21st, and I happened to glance around the bar to find Tom at the table across from us. A little tipsy, I said "Well, shit, hi Tom!" loudly, and he looked around like "Oh shit, I'm nailed," and saw it was me. Apparently he was there to see a waitress he was banging. We've talked about the incident a few times since, as we get along fairly well. He confided to me that the waitress in question would sit in the sink and turn the faucet on as a sort of backwards bidee to wash her pussy after sex.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

 

This photo gives you an idea of the size of what's called a Rider Reach. They weigh close to 11,000 pounds empty, and in the neighborhood of 20,000 at load capacity.

 

I saw one of these things flip over once, and it was probably among the most terrifying things I've ever witnessed. Chris, who is currently serving in the US Army somewhere in the pacific, had a load on his forks, extended, and up in the air, which totally unbalances the machine while it's in motion. He whipped a corner (they are deceptively fast. ~15mph at full speed) and the thing tilted very slowly. He went "Oh fuck" and bailed. Everyone in the area ran like hell, and it very slowly teetered to an angle beyond the point of no return, then fell and fell fast. Sounded like a bomb going off. Literally.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I wanna work in a warehouse.

[MrRant 0]

A warehouse would eat you alive.

 

I'd have to sit and think of warehouse stories as it's been since high school that I worked at one and it was small one.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

Last night a high school graduate asked why people don't breed dogs and cats, or horses and cattle together.

[JangoFett4Hire 0]

I worked in a warehouse during summers as a college student. Some other seasonal workers and I would ride hand/pallet jacks like scooters.

Occasionally, we would race them. It was fun.

 

One of us found out the code to dial on the phone to access the PA. We would go into corners, punch the code in and sing over the PA, just a few lines of Alice in Chains or Tripping Daisy songs. Good times.

[Black Lushus 0]

Was your warehouse without management or did they not care? People here can get fired for riding hand jacks like scooters...and the PA thing? oh hell no!

[JangoFett4Hire 0]

I don't remember anybody getting caught. They probably cared, but we didn't, we were just dumb college kids, working there for the summer.

 

I do remember some dipshit got busted tagging the bathroom stalls. They were really pissed about that, they had memos up all over the place until the perp was caught. It was like the FBI looking for Whitey.

[Guest Felonies!]

I'll admit the cat/dog thing was silly, but horse/cattle really put my gears in motion. We could be talking the ultimate draft beast here.

[Black Lushus 0]

AoO, have you ever seen a forklift get stuck in between a trailer that has somehow shifted and the dock plate (picture the front wheels in the trailer, the back wheels still on the plate and air between on the bottom)? Also, recently, we had a guy on his riding jack inside of a trailer as the driver took off away from the building towards the exit out to the street.

[EricMM 0]

The Office has made warehouses cool again.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

AoO, have you ever seen a forklift get stuck in between a trailer that has somehow shifted and the dock plate (picture the front wheels in the trailer, the back wheels still on the plate and air between on the bottom)? Also, recently, we had a guy on his riding jack inside of a trailer as the driver took off away from the building towards the exit out to the street.

 

Try FORKS in the trailer, and nose on the dock plate. Happened last winter to this guy named Brian.

 

One of these:

 

On our backhaul loads, there's no driver or rig or anything to anchor the trailer, and in an icy lot, there's no way to chock the wheels of the trailer, plus my place is too lame to get dock locks. He went tearassing into the trailer, hit the dock plate, squirted the trailer out, and was suspended like I described. He came up to me pale as a ghost and said "Hey, I think you should call maintenance." I asked him why and he led me over to his dock door, so I asked him if he wanted to go home to change his shorts. I've had one scoot out on me a couple times. Never THAT bad, but even a little shift is scary as fuck on a three ton machine.

[Black Lushus 0]

this incident was on a standard sit down forklift, however we do have 3 of those stand-up ones which I refuse to drive.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

They're really pretty easy. The big Rider Reach machines are a colossal bitch, though. We have quite a few different machines out here. The only one I won't drive is the big swing-arm counterbalance, which is about 15 feet long and 6 feet wide, seated, with controls that look like a fighter jet.

[Rendclaw 0]

This has to be the funniest thread I have read in almost four years in this place.

 

Fontunately the majority of the workers in the warehouse know what the fuck they are doing, and there is rarely any turnover... so when someone DOES fuck up they catch shit about it for at least a week.

 

Larry is the old biker guy in my warehouse, but he's nicer. His wife has him trained, even though he thinks he still has his freedom by flirting with every woman he meets... Though I have to admit, he's smooth.

 

Its a little fucked up in my warehouse right now, because one of our drivers died in his sleep at the ripe old age of 25. Can you believe that shit?

[Guest Hotbutter Spoontoaster]

yeah, i can.

[FroGG_NeaL 0]

I used to work at some loading docks in a warehouse.

 

I'll post some stories later.

 

And riding those forklifts is pretty gotdamn awesome.

[Rendclaw 0]

The novelty wears off after about three months and a certification training class on a saturday morning.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

Richard weighs at least 400 pounds, is diabetic, has gray hair, and is extremely myopic. His job is to supervise the mongoloids that hang empty totes on a hook line that the piece-pickers fill orders with. I don't know if any of you guys have customers that get piece orders, since cases are more efficient, but we ship half of our stuff by the piece..like one bag of candy or jar of pickles instead of cases or pallets of the stuff.

 

Anyway, back to Richard. Guy was hanging totes when one fell off the line and hit him in the ankle. He didn't think anything of it. About twenty minutes later, another tote hanger was walking by and mused "Gee, Richard, you're bleedin' pretty bad."

 

Guy was literally standing in a 2 foot puddle of blood. Of course he freaks, and his fat ass wobbles all the way to the health office, where of course, we have no one qualified to work in on second and third shift. His shoe was so full of blood that it was SQUIRTING out of his foot and leaving footprints all the way to the office (about 20 yards). Turns out the tote burst a cyst in his foot, and he didn't even feel it.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

The worst injury I can remember out there involved this mexican guy who was picking cases and running a riding jack like the one described earlier in the thread. One of the rider reach operators was putting a pallet away on the highest rack in the building, which is 60 or 70 feet high, at least. There was already a pallet up there that he couldn't see, so the pallet he was putting away pushed the invisible pallet into the pallet across the rack, which promptly fell off and knocked the pallet and about 40 cases of splenda on to the mexican's head. Didn't kill him, but it cracked his head open like an egg and fucked up his neck bad. I guess he can still walk, and has all of his necessary functions, but has this haggard scar on his scalp and a fucked up back. Management claims he only was hit by the cases (which are relatively light) and not the pallet (which weighs 70 pounds). We were all skeptical, although the pallet probably would've killed him from that height.