Chapter 35: Nights
Kimball Staffing is two rooms above a phone repair shop.
You go in at eight and sit until somebody calls a name.
They ask four things. Can you lift twenty-five kilos. Can you stand eight hours. Steel toes. Can you start tonight.
I said yes, yes, no, and yes.
They sold me the boots. Thirty-four dollars, off the first pay.
The client was Redmore Fulfilment, unit 6 on the Baxendale estate. Ten at night to six.
Seventeen forty an hour. Twenty-two ten after midnight, which is why people take nights.
Five shifts is seven hundred before deductions and five fifty after.
The building is one hundred and ninety metres long. I paced it the first week, because of course I did.
Sealed concrete. Yellow walkways. A mezzanine on the north side.
The racking goes up four and a half metres. You pick the bottom three levels. Above that is a machine's job.
You get a cart, a scanner on your wrist, and a headset that reads you a location.
Aisle F. Bay 14. Level 2. Take three.
You take three, you scan, the voice gives the next one, and it never thanks you.
The target was a hundred and ten picks an hour.
I hit it on the third night. By the second week I was doing a hundred and forty.
I want to be careful here, because it sounds like boasting and it is not.
I was better at that job than anybody on the floor, because it is a footwork problem.
Everybody else walks to the bay, stops, turns, reaches, turns back, walks on.
Four changes of direction per pick.
If you arrive already turned, it is one.
You do not stop and then turn. You turn as you arrive, so the stopping and the turning are one movement.
It is the first thing you are taught at twelve, by a man with a whistle who is still alive.
I have not stood on a mat in twelve years. My feet have not forgotten a thing.
The other pickers were mostly men in their twenties.
Nobody asked me anything. That is the great mercy of night work.
On nights, everybody is somebody who could not get days, and nobody asks.
Petro was about sixty. Four years there, and he knew where everything was without the headset.
He watched me two nights and said, “You are not from warehouse.”
“No.”
“What are you from?”
I thought about it and said, “Sport.”
He nodded as though that settled it and never asked again.
Delphine worked the packing benches and brought a flask in and shared it.
Marcus, the supervisor, read numbers off a screen at four in the morning whether you wanted them or not.
At the end of the second week he said my name, a number, and then, “Floor record for the shift.”
Nobody clapped. It was four in the morning. Somebody said something about the vending machine.
But something came up through my chest that had not been there in three years, and I put a hand on the racking.
Here is what frightened me about it.
I slept in a bunk in a shelter. Eleven conditions, a court date, four hundred dollars.
No house. No husband who would answer a phone. A charge that barred me from every building I have ever loved.
And I was happier at two in the morning in unit 6 than at any dinner table in three years.
That is not a triumphant sentence. It is an indictment of the three years.
The work is simple. People romanticise it. It does not deserve that.
It is cold. The doors at the north end stand open for the trailers.
Your hands crack. There is a tub of barrier cream by the clock and it is always nearly empty.
Your feet go at hour five and come back at hour six, which nobody has explained.
You walk about twenty kilometres a shift. Delphine had a step counter.
The lights are on sensors. If an aisle stays quiet they drop, and you wave an arm.
The music is a radio station above the benches, and it is the same forty songs.
There is one more thing, and it is why I could do the job at all.
The reaching. Level 2 is chest height. Level 3 is eye level.
Level 3 is where the shoulder lives or dies.
A right-handed person takes level 3 with the right arm, elevated and slightly across the body.
That is the exact position a torn labrum will not forgive.
So I did not do it. Not once, in four months.
I turned my whole body and took every level 3 item with the left, slower by a second and a half.
Thirty of those a night is forty-five seconds given away. I made it back in the corners.
That is the whole trick, and the only thing I did in those four months that I am unambiguously proud of.