The Idler

Warehouse Production Unit

During the summer of 1995 my friend and I obtained what seemed to be a dream summer job working for 300 bucks a week as “Re-agent Personnel” in a Californian warehouse production unit. However, initial portents weren’t good. On our first morning a call from reception in our motel awoke us from our drunken blackout informing us that our boss was here to pick us up. Five minutes later we were in his car trying to pass of the alcohol fumes as jet lag and picking bits of vegetation out of our smelly clothes.

We were immediately set to work stickering boxes, most of which my friend managed to put on upside down, a minor tragedy in this perfection drenched state. We were then moved onto bottling chemicals. This involved receiving an electric shock every single time we screwed on the cap of a bottle of chemical reagents through the static build-up.

Next up on the torture list was the glue gun. Now anyone with a clear head can handle the glue gum without causing much harm to oneself. However, with the daily hangover and the heat in the air-conditioning free warehouse rising to 100 degrees everyday then the tendency to inflict glue burns on one’s hands increases five hundredfold. After a day of this our hands were shot to pieces. Making boxes came as light relief afterwards - apart from the numerous cardboard cuts you’d invariably receive.

A tad unaware of what the company did, a few tentative enquiries were made as to the possibility of other tasks. We were sent to the “shaking blood” department by the still unimpressed vice president. Hours of “shaking plastic bottles of goat and alligator blood to get rid of the blood clots.” Unsurprisingly, the novelty wore off quickly and we were informed that the next task was “quantifying urea products”. We were set to work bottling piss. We didn’t ask what sort, as we weren’t sure whether it was preferable to be bottling human or animal waste water. Luckily it wasn’t still warm.

We were constantly kept on edge by the bitter supervisor having screaming tantrums every time something minor went wrong and the fact that our new found best friend (the local dealer) insisted we share a bowl of weed with him at every opportunity, especially at 6am in the morning before work. However, after an incident with a unpaid police fine stemming from an overloaded car, things went sour after one of my co-workers threatened to kill my friend. We realised we’d outstayed our welcome and took off to Los Angeles.

Nathan King