The Last Year, Part 4

More Box Shed Stories

During my pre-married days, I either drove to work from my parents house in Lake City, usually over the then new Evergreen bridge. At that time, you could get a commuter book of 20 trips, and the toll person took a ticket each way. It came to $0.195. Regular cash trip was $0.35. It was always fun during a storm when the waves would crash over the side onto the roadway. Later they added some buffers to decrease the waves overtopping the side.

After I moved into the bachelor apartment with Mark Merryman, I would often just ride my bike to work. One time the security guards came back and said they were looking for a hippie on a bike driving around the back lot. Yeah, me the hippie. I would even ride back to the apt on my ½ hour lunch break. Not a lot of time to make the trip, eat, and ride back, but I liked getting away from the shed.

After a cold snap, the floor of the shed would be very cold. Surprise, it’s not like we had heat in the open building or anything. Having a cold floor was no problem, but if it warmed up fairly quickly, and the humidity went up, guess where the warm, wet air condensed? Yep the floor would get wet, and stay wet for a day or so. Well , the smooth wheels on the pallet jack didn’t steer, or stop very well on the slick floor. We’d throw sawdust around for traction and that was a mess.

Repairing pallets was done every day. Sometimes one person on a table, once in a while 2, sometimes several tables going at once. Crowbars, 20 oz. hammers, and air driven staple or nail guns were the main tools. We went through thousands of dollars of wood slats, and staples/nails a month. Noisy too.

I had a replacement job for a time, when the yard cleaner guy was on vacation. I’d drive around and clean all of the trailer side of the docks, clean out the trailer wash pit, and assorted other odd and end jobs. The trailer wash was a machine that had a 40 foot apparatus that the yard switch driver would use and back his trailer over the long gadget. A sensor would then turn on pumps to spray hi pressure water out jets as he pulled the trailer back out. The water jets would wash anything in the trailer out the back. All that stuff was what I had to clean up.

For a sanitation rule, there was a foot and a half white paint line around the walls. Theory was that any rats, mice etc. would use that area and you could shine a UV light on the white paint to see rat leftovers. Yeah right. We’d dutifully wave the UV light around, but never, NEVER saw any traces.

If the baler shredding part got ahead of the baler bailing part, it was possible to jam up the chute 

where it constricted from a large round silo thing to the square section that fed the baler. If it wasn’t noticed, the large silo could fill up with chopped up cardboard. When that happened, we’d shut off the machines, and climb up on the roof, and the ladder up to a side door in the chute. You’d have to lean in and keep grabbing handfuls of damp cardboard, being sure not to have your head in the chute when the blockage gave way and rushed down into the baler machine. Another OSHA heart attack job.

We were supposed to remove twine etc. before it went into the baler. That was never perfect, so every few weeks, we’d turn off the machine, and climb into the shredder, sit there with your legs in the chopper area and use knives to cut the twine rope off the shredder axle. Took quite a time. It would have been a bad day had someone not known we were in there and turned on the machine.

Later!

The Last Year, Part 3

Hi Again.

Kind of a rough day at work today, so to reset my mind, another installment of looking back over my working career. Aren’t you guys lucky?

Box Shed Continued: I spent a lot of time at the box shed. I had different shifts, with Graveyard (Midnight to 8:30) and days, from 8:00 to 4:30 being the most. I spent some time on Swing (4:00 PM until 12:30) as well.

Mondays were the heaviest days for unloading trailers and sorting the boxes and other stuff that either makes round trips to the stores (Milk crates, egg crates, bread trays, etc.) or things that came back and were recycled by being sold (cardboard) or things like pallets that went right back into the warehouses for reuse.

I spent my initial years as a straight warehousemen (yeah, it was never called a warehouse-person) doing the sorting stuff. For the first couple of years in the new shed, I also did a job of sanding the labels off of wood peach lugs so that they could be resold to local growers. I was by myself in a corner of the baler shed holding these lugs (boxes) one at a time against this huge machine that spun a belt of floor sanding material to grind off the labels, and make the box look sort of new. I brought my own goggles, face mask and ear protection as this was loud dusty and more than a little scary as if I had a moments inattention and allowed any part of me to brush against that rotating belt of the coarsest sandpaper you can imagine, I would have lost whatever touched it in a flash. Of course, being along, no one would know I was in trouble until a break when I didn’t show up to have a cup of (very poor) coffee. Not even sure then.

Break time was in a very small room. In those days the smokers dominated that kind of work force so being in that room was not that great if you wanted to breath. Alas, it was the only heated room in the facility so I did the breaks there and just had to put up with the blue air. There was one summer where the air smoke was a little different. One the of the guys was a committed stoner, and every break would lite up his little pipe with something that had a very unique smell. Yeah, those were the days.

Besides the box sanding business, we were also the place where pallet boards were repaired. The company bought extra slat boards (1x6’s) and nails for the air powered guns by the truck load. Anther very noisy job with us swing 20 oz hammers, crow bars and shooting those nail guns all shifts. We were usually able to repair a stack of 15 pallets every hour. Some repairs were quick, others required more. It was a job that you just got into a pace and didn’t think too much.

After a time, I moved on to a fork truck driver. For an astounding extra $0.10 an hour, I got to sit for part of the day. The job consisted of either working the yard, or loading pallets of boxes or paper bales on the customers truck, or for cardboard bales often a rail car. This job was either fairly easy, with me picking up large garbage containers, driving over to a huge truck sized compactor and dumping the container, back across the yard with it empty, rinse repeat.

Loading the paper (carboard) trucks and rail cars was more fast paced.    It was full speed from start to end. The truck drivers appreciated a quick load, so we hustled when they were there. Sometimes alone, sometimes 2 of us working opposite sides of the truck. In rail cars, we would work in pairs most often, with one of us using a pallet jack to bring a stack of store bales (smaller) and push them over onto the floor (boom) and stack the pallets. The fork guy would grab what bales was the right size for a spot he had and shove it into the stack already in the car. If we were loading baler bales (much bigger and heavier), we’d have one fork guy on the ground where those bales were stored, and one buy up in the shed to load into the car. Again, a fast paced task.

Sometimes, we’d have more than one car to load. When we had to move the cars down the track to have a new empty by our loading door, we’d call the whole box shed crew to come out and we’d release the brakes and push the things down the track. It was a break in the routine, and the position of brakeman was the jewel on this task to release, ride the car, and then to spin the cars brake wheel when in position.

All you folks really bored with this diatribe? 

More later!

Dad

Hot Trip Coming Up!

The Last Year Part 2

1968-1969 Safeway Box Shed (Part Time):  Ok, now the fun begins. Pretty much right towards the end of my senior year of high school, I got a summer and part time job at the Old Box Shed at the Safeway Distribution Center. I worked the 2 AM to 10:30 AM Shift.

Most produce in those days came in wood or in some cases cardboard boxes. Mostly wood. There were a lot of types and sizes of boxes, and all of them had to be separated, stacked on pallets, tied up and moved out. They were sold to local farmers for them to refill and send back to the produce warehouse. There was lots of money involved in those boxes. Each box had a name, a specific way to nest or load on a pallet.

The trucks coming back from the stores had this stuff stacked haphazard on pallets. In this first year of my working, it was in the Old Box Shed, a fairly small area near the main produce warehouse. It was no where near big enough. The truck drivers shoving the pallets in one end had a single goal, to empty the trailers so they could be loaded again. They didn’t care so much if they were shoving the stuff in faster than we could stack it and get the stuff out. I still remember the voice of this rather large Italian unloader shouting a warning “I’m A Gonna Push!” If you ever want to know the names and description of the boxes we sorted back then, just ask, I think I can still name several dozen.

A companion job associated with the Box Shed was the cardboard baler. The machine my first year was a real bear to work. You needed 2 guys to lift these big burlap squares onto a platform, and dump on a belt. Two other guys pick through the cardboard looking for things that didn’t belong in the recycle cardboard. The cardboard then went through a chopper and was blown up and fell down into a machine that compressed the paper into a bale (Hence the name baler). This first generation machine had to be stopped each time a bale was complete and metal bands were shoved through slots in the ram, and the bales was tied up. A forklift took the bale and stacked it. You earned your pay working this job.

After I started classes at the UW, I worked Friday and Saturday nights. Pretty decent pay at the time for a part time job.

1969-1982 (?): New Box Shed: They built a new, much larger facility after my first year. Maybe 24 trailer docks as opposed to the 4-5 at the old shed, a ground level belt for the much larger cardboard baler, that also had a ramp from the main shed level. The box shed (it was still called that) was divided about half and half for unloading trailers, and a side to load up different trailers of the various things we separated that came back from the stores. The design had a major mistake, in that a ramp to ground level was right in the middle of the building, making a narrow bottleneck when we were taking pallets from the unloading end to the reloading side. In future years, this design flaw as fixed.

Like the Old shed, trailers from the stores needed to be unloaded so they were empty and ready for a new load. They had all of the produce boxes as before, plus Wire Cribs (A fence like thing that attaches to a pallet to make a big box), meat lugs (Aluminum things about 18 inches wide and about 4 feet long and a foot deep. They nested together and were heavy when you had a bunch of them. Add glass returnable pop bottles, metal bread trays, wood milk cases, returned products that went to a salvage department, stacks of pallets, broken pallets, junk (that shouldn’t have come back), wooden banana tubs (About the same size as the Meat lugs), Egg cases, and store size bales of cardboard.

All this stuff came back around the clock as the new shed was a 6 ½ day, 24 hour facility. Only late Saturday to Sunday was quiet.

My first years there were pretty much limited to working the boxes, or the paper. The box job was the same as across the street at the old shed, just more room. They would still saturate the larger space with pallets of boxes during busy days. Mondays were the busiest by far as the stores sent back all of the empties from the weekend.

At the paper end, there were two ways to process the cardboard. The hard way, was to work on the ground behind this mountain of the square burlap bundles that the truck drivers huck onto the ground. The squares are tied up with steel wire ties to hold the bundle together. SO, you grab a bundle, cut the wires with a pair of diagonal cutters, and pull a corner of the burlap to dump the paper onto the belt. You had to spread the paper out a bit as if you had it too thick, it would choke the chopper. That’d be bad.

Another was to feed the baler was up on the shed floor, where the store bales were pushed to the opening, the wires cut and the layers of cardboard dumped down the ramp, just past the poor guy working the burlap bundles.

When the chopper jams, the 100 HP motor still tries to turn it, and the belts squeal, and if the power to the motor isn’t cut like in seconds, the motor can and did burn itself up. Very bad. The chopper was a big shaft that had these steel pieces, think of a 18 inch 1x4, that pun between a second set of steel pieces that chopped the cardboard into smaller pieces. A very large fan then sucked the paper past a set of water sprayers, then into the fan, up a chute to the roof, where a silo deal caught the paper and it fell down another chute into the baler proper.

This baler was a continuous feed type. As the paper was compressed and shaped into the bale, every 12 feet a big rubber divider would drop as the baler went into a special cycle to push, back off a bit, open the trap door to let the divider drop, than continue to bale the next bale behind the completed bale. The guy working the machine would go around back and force round steel wires through slots in the divider to the front. Back at the front, he would take the ends and use a air driven tier to twist and cut the wires to tie up tie up the paper. Next he’d grab the loose ends of the 4 wires, he’d pull them the length of the machine, and push them through the rubber divider so they’d be ready in back for the next complete bale.

While all this was happening, he needed to push a completed bale down a set of rollers, and use a fork lift to stack it. That would cause the divider rubber to fall down, where it had to be dragged to a little lift gadget to get it back up on the top of the machine over the trap door ready to drop again the next time a bale was ready. All the while the other crew people were sending cardboard through the choppers, so it was a continuous cycle. No rest for the weary. This was another job where you knew you earned your pay.

More Later!