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