Have you ever bought something that came in a box that proudly proclaimed: “Some assembly required”? And if you have, then how many times have you found yourself hunched over, hours later, hexagonal wrench in between your lips, spread out on all fours, desperately searching for a washer (clearly labeled as item P-98756 in the “easy to follow manual”) that seems to have been forgotten at the factory?
And after your relentless search, some irate cuss-filled rants, and perhaps even a few tantrums that resemble a four year old who doesn’t want to finish his glass of milk, have you finally given up on your quest, and flipped to the front page of the manual, only to find an idiotic warning claiming, “some pieces required for assembly may not have been included”?
If you have, then you’ve probably felt completely shafted and oddly humiliated by the fact that because some idiot forgot to include your very important part, you now have to call up the company, in order to order a piece of equipment that should have been included in the first place! And you have to go through this ordeal, all so that you can then wait for the part to be shipped at some absurdly slow rate, before you even get to finish assembling your cheesy new desk chair, rowing machine, or whatever else it is that you bought in its raw, unassembled form. Life can be so unfair!
Now, imagine that you work on cars for a living. And imagine further that you work on Automatic Transmissions. Now imagine that you want to assemble or repair an automatic transmission, for the lowest possible cost. Well, if this is your reality, then chances are you have ordered some or all of your parts from the most affordable and reliable Automatic Transmission Wholesale Distribution Warehouse not just in the Pacific Northwest, but in all of North America!
And if you’ve ordered some of their transmission parts in the last few days, and found some inane, yet absolutely pertinent part missing from your order, or even worse, the wrong part in the missing part’s place, then guess what newly hired moron inadvertently screwed up your order? That’s right! That moron was most likely me—because I am the newest “Warehouse Distribution Parts Monkey” at Portland’s oldest Automatic Transmission Parts Wholesale Warehouse Dealership!
So far, two days into my new part time career as a “Warehouse Distribution Parts Monkey” (also known as a “WaDiPaMo” [pronounced: Wah-Dee-Pah-Moh] (my term, not theirs, of course)), I have to admit that I’m quite smitten with my new job!
I love the pressure of watching my dot matrix printer (circa 1987) print out a new order for a delivery, and then having less than ten minutes, on average, to try and dig up the most asinine, eclectic pieces of machinery from a gigantic warehouse full of more than 220,000 parts, each carefully organized and labeled in stacks and rows of narrowly connected pathways. Every time I get one of these orders, it’s basically like I’m involved in the final Supermarket Sweep Showdown on an episode of the failed game show “Supermarket Sweep”—I have to race against a clock to pull randomly assigned items off of shelves from a giant space that is roughly three times the size of your average supermarket!
I also love the rush of checking these items off, one by one, and then carefully labeling them each with a magic marker, and then packaging them into leftover boxes and bags, and using twisty ties to hold together multiple washers, cogs, sprockets, and o-rings, so that the delivery driver feels appropriately coddled. I love checking off each of these items as I do so, and then initialing the bottom of the order to proudly risk my good name as a name that ensures accuracy and excellence in the field of delivering a prompt, proficiently organized package to all of our delivery truck drivers and will call customers!
But what I love the most of all about my new job is the fact that I have no customers. After spending the last five years in Food Service, I cannot relate just how nice it is to show up to work for five hours, and only spend about ten minutes of that time talking to a human being. I converse only with three people; my only supervisor, Roger, about company protocol, Leonard, the short, gnome-like perennially agitated and angry, West Side Delivery driver, who likes to tell me, because I’m new, about just how he wants his orders packed (he makes demands that my boss has repeatedly told me I don’t have to listen to, yet I somehow feel compelled to act in accordance with Leonard’s will—I think it’s only because he shares my Father’s first name…), and last but not least, with my extremely kind and considerate boss, Gary, who checks in for about two minutes each day to make sure that I haven’t quit yet. These three aside, I deal with nothing except a giant, crammed warehouse, and a radio that is stuck on the only channel I would ever listen to anyway – 94.7—home of Portland’s one and only alternative radio channel.
94.7 is the saving grace of my job. I mean, it’s practically a sign from god that my latest job FORCES me to listen to a station featuring programming that only a complete and utter moron like me would have come up with! I mean, they only play music from the last 25 years of rock n’ roll, and everyday at noon they feature ‘the nineties at noon’ an hour long program that only plays music that came out during the hey day of my adolescence.
In ten hours of work, so far, I’ve already had the pleasure of hearing Nirvana ten times, I’ve heard Bush and Pearl Jam at least five times each, they even play Radiohead, The Presidents of the United States of America, Luscious Jackson, The Verve, Soundgarden, Smash Mouth, R.E.M, Alice in Chains, and Green Day. And even though I’ve never been a fan, I even have to tip my nostalgic hat to The Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Smashing Pumpkins when they come on.
In summation, I GET to hear pretty much every band that most of you have either forgotten existed, never liked in the first place, or who came after (or god forbid) before your time. But to me, these tunes bring to mind one of my most favorite summers; The Summer of 1996—the last summer that I embraced the holiness that is Sony Play Station Baseball, Alternative Radio, Bar-B-Q Sunflower Seeds, Red Vines Licorice, and Coca-Cola Classic!
Sometimes, my job is physically demanding, which I also love! My first day on the job, for example, in between the 10:30 and 12:30 delivery rushes, I had to take fifty, sixty plus pound boxes of transmission parts off a conveyer belt, and haul them across the gigantic warehouse and find space for them in the ‘overflow’ departments of each section where they belong. My back was kind of sore that night, but my muscles felt good the next morning. The way I see it, I’m getting paid to lift weights and exercise.
The easiest part of my job, by far, is the part where I take labels that Roger has made, and put them on individual parts so that customers can be assured that they are receiving the right parts that they ordered. The way I see it, I’m getting paid to play with stickers.
Roger is real cool. He likes his job (he has actual responsibilities that consume his mental acumen, he’s memorized virtually each of the six digit codes for all of the 200,000 plus parts that we offer, and he’s in charge of assembling kits that make it easier for lousy mechanics to fake their ability to repair transmissions…so while I have a job, he has a career.)
Roger is soft spoken, with an odd sense of humor, and he looks like he spent most of his youth getting high, drinking Olympia from a can, and listening to Jethro Tull—so he’s my kind of guy, only you have to insert Pavement for Jethro Tull. Roger and me? We’re both just your iconoclastic philosophers; men who find meaning in the meditative process that is inundating yourself with Transmission Auto parts for hours each day.
The best aspect of my job is that I’m part time, and they cannot afford to take me on full time (which I don’t want, because my other part time job is this—writing), so they will never make me stay and work overtime, and no one can call in sick and expect me to cover for them. And they are always closed on weekends. This means that with my new job, there are no surprises. I know exactly when I’m supposed to show up, exactly when I will get to leave, and I know that each day, I face just one of three tasks (assembling delivery and will call packages, placing stickers on small parts, and loading heavy boxes).
So I have basically been hired to play with stickers, exercise, and practice the Supermarket Sweep, all the while listening to all of my favorite songs from my youth. I get to day dream about anything that I want to while I am there, because my job is not very intellectually demanding, which means that I can multi-task and outline future writings in my head, while getting paid.
Of course, the hardest part of my job is spent trying to build good rapport with Roger, because he’s a damn likable guy, and if he doesn’t like me, then he will have to fire me and replace me with a different Wadipamo—and that would be quite demoralizing. Besides, even if I didn’t like Roger (Which I do!) I’m all about playing on a team, and Roger, well, he’s the only other player on the best team around in Automatic Transmission Wholesale Distribution Warehouses located in the Pacific Northwest, better known as the team: “Roger and Me.”