June 29, 2011

• J. B. Gottstein’s Warehouse in the Pipeline Boom

  Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

  It was a new building, unfinished, surrounded by rough gravelly ground.  The company had expanded its facilities upon winning the contract to supply foodstuffs and general merchandise to Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction camps.  There was little talk and always a sense of urgent hurry to load and unload the vans backed up to the docks along the street side of the warehouse, except at break times.  Then everything went quiet and still, except for the voices of the men, joking, insulting each other, and making bets, or noises of joy or disgust, over the ongoing blackjack games in the “break room.”

  It wasn’t a room… wasn’t even an alcove.  It was the roof over the rest room, tucked in behind the drive-in freezer and refrigerator next to the partitioned-off office area that took up a small portion of the northwest corner of the warehouse.  Access was a set of unpainted open stairs up the side of the rest room, and accommodations up there included a table and a few chairs.  I went up there once before I learned by observation that it was the exclusive domain of an elite clique of warehousemen, including the shift foreman and shop steward.  Everyone else took breaks sitting on the machinery or the merchandise.

  I developed the habit of grabbing a cup of coffee and going back to my corner of the warehouse, propping a butt cheek on whatever pallet-load of boxes was a comfortable height for me.  Most of my time was spent in that northeast corner of the warehouse, at the end of the row of electrical outlets along the north wall, where pallet jacks were plugged in for recharging.  “Recouping”, I learned, meant cleaning up the men’s messes.

  If a pallet was overturned or dropped, or rammed into a wall or the upright on one of the big racks, or if somebody had his forks a bit too high and ran them through the boxes instead of the pallet, damaged cases were hauled back to my corner and dropped.  Most of that hauling and dropping was done on the swing shift, when there were fewer incoming and outgoing vans, fewer warehousmen on duty, and the janitors could get into the aisles between pallet racks to clean up messes.  Unless a mess was badly obstructing the work of the day shift warehousemen, it would be left where it fell.  Union rules:  warehousemen didn’t do janitorial work.

  On my first day there, a forklift operator approached me, stopped his machine, and asked if I’d been told that damaged cases of snack foods were to go to the break room.  My instructions had been fairly detailed and explicit:  I was to inspect broken cases, remove dented cans, broken jars, etc., repack the undamaged cans and jars, tape the cases shut and mark them to indicate how many were missing.  Dented cans, crushed cracker boxes, and anything else that was unsalable but apparently still edible was to be packed in assorted cases for donation to charities.  Nobody had mentioned taking snacks to the break room.

  The guy insisted that this was the usual policy, and went on to say that he really liked Cheez-It Crackers, and if I ever found any of them, I was to bring them to the break room for him.  Not long after that, sure enough, I found a case of Cheez-Its in one of the heaps of damaged cases,  largely undamaged except for a deep dent in one side and a big boot print where someone, presumably the Cheez-It loving forklift operator, had stomped it.  Stomped Cheez-It cases showed up periodically afterward, every few days, as the supply in the break room ran low.  Eventually, a few other guys mentioned to me that they were getting pretty sick of nothing but Cheez-Its, so I diverted a few other kinds of crushed crackers and such from the charity boxes to the break room.

  My job title was “recouper and inventory control clerk” but it was hardly a clerical job.  Each shift, before wading into the mess in my corner, I took a clipboard and walked the aisles, noting down the numbers of any empty slots in the pallet racks.  That was inventory control.  Picking up and dropping off my inventory clipboard were the only times I entered the office area.  The two women who worked in the office, a secretary and a receptionist, never entered the warehouse itself.  I was the only woman in that enormous ozone- and testosterone-reeking echo chamber, and from the demeanor of many of the men, I was the first woman they’d ever had to work with.

  Some of them obviously resented my presence, and others seemed uncomfortable, inhibited around me.  Once, early on, a man was saying something to another as I approached, his speech liberally laced with the f-word.  As soon as he saw me, he went silent, lowered his eyes, blushed and said, “pardon my language.”  I shrugged and replied, “I don’t give a fuck what you say around me.”  He looked stunned, and I heard a few nervous laughs and one or two hearty guffaws.  Things started loosening up after that.
  
  More about the warehouse, next time.

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  • 8:11 pm
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