So I’m working in a warehouse in OK City. It’s not fun, and it doesn’t pay enough, but at least it brings some money in.

The warehouse is half an hour’s drive away from our apartment. I figured out a back way to go, a pleasant drive and I’ve yet to get stuck in rush hour traffic. My shift is weird. It goes like this:

Mon: 800-430
Tue-Thur: 800-530
Fri: 800-100

Except we’ve been working an hour of overtime on Mondays. Supposedly, we work an extra hour on Fridays too, but we didn’t this last one.

The schedule makes sense if you know what we do each day. The warehouse is part of Mardel Christian & Education Supply. That’s a chain of stores that sell Christian books, music, and gifts along with office supplies and educational supplies. I work in the central warehouse, where all the product for the stores comes in. There’s a team of stockers on a shift one hour earlier than ours that receive the stock shipped to us and put it in the appropriate slots in the warehouse. I’m on a team of “pullers” who go around with wheeled carts and pull everything that each store needs, put price stickers on it, pack it up, and give it to the guy who loads the trucks. Monday through Thursday, we send stuff to about five stores each day. There are twenty stores, from Arkansas to Colorado, so it works out about right. Each store gets several pallets of product once a week. We don’t ship anything on Friday, because it would get there on Saturday. So we do some inventory and help out the stockers some on Friday and go home early.

I was in training my first two days. It’s not complicated. I look for the corresponding numbers and letters indicating in which slot the product I need to pull is. There’s a number for the aisle, a number for the section, a letter for the row, and a number for the slot. But for a day and a half, my trainer watched me pull stuff. It must have been very boring for her. I told her she needed a rolly chair, and she agreed.

On the third day, I got to work without a minder. I also got my very own big blue metal cart (it looks like a bookshelf, with three shelves, on wheels) with a plastic container in which were some pencils, a marker (which I lost today making a tight turn, I think), a brand new tape gun, an extra roll of tape, and a safety knife labeled “KAREN.”

Yesterday, I heard someone yelling, “Karen! Karen!” I looked up and saw that one of the stockers was waving my knife, which I had dropped and forgotten to pick back up.

I hate the safety knife. You can only use it if you’re holding the blade button down with your thumb, which means you can only cut one direction. And I have to be careful putting it in my pocket, because the knob catches and opens the blade. Now THAT’s safe. But we have to use them, so my trusty box opener lies dormant at home.

My cart also comes with a ladder labeled “ZACH” and a hook on a broomstick. Both of these are for reaching product that’s just too far away otherwise. The hook is cool. It makes me feel like a whaler. I tend to use it a lot because it’s easier to grab than the ladder, but I’m sure I’m using it improperly, because I use it to pull down boxes of product from the top shelf whenever I discover my slots are empty and must be restocked. I try to catch the boxes as they fall. It’s okay. I don’t pull anything much that’s fragile. They won’t let new employees pull gifts until they’ve been there six months.

Along with my cart, I was assigned two departments to pull–Educational Books and Childrens 2–and my own aisles to sweep–9-12. For every store, I pull all the product they need in those two departments, and then go see what’s left to get in the other departments. I usually end up doing three runs for each store.

All of this is fine and good. It’s not complicated, and it’s not really hard, although I can barely reach the top level of slots, standing on tip-toe and stretching my arm as far as I can, and I have to kneel down to reach the stuff on floor level. But the problem is that this whole process is timed. Every time I get my department printout and stickers, I have to clock-in that run into a computer. Once I complete the run, I clock-out on the computer again (then put my stuff on one of the pallets waiting for that store). The computer then knows exactly how much product I pulled and how long it took me. Each department has a standard for how fast it can be pulled, and I have to meet that minimum requirement.

For instance, Educational Books is an aisle with nothing but Ed Books on either side. I’m supposed to be able to grab 220 pieces of product in one hour. That’s pretty dad gum fast. We’re not talking about a system that eliminates dawdling. I have yet to reach the standard going as fast as I possibly can.

Fortunately, I have 3 months to get up to speed. Still, it’s nerve-wracking and exhausting. I was wondering how in the world I was going to get faster. But on Friday, my trainer, who is also the team leader’s assistant, gave me my results for the week. I was at 81.5%. And that’s counting the first couple of days when I was still trying to figure out what the heck I was doing. She said that was excellent time for a first week. “Some people aren’t that fast after several weeks,” she said. I was even at 99% for a couple of runs. That made me feel quite relieved.

And I am getting faster. I can now find the locations by glancing at the once cryptic combinations of letters and numbers…without really thinking about it. I can rip stickers off quite quickly and change their orientation with my fingers in a moment if I have an upside down book. I know where my runs begin and end and don’t have to wonder around the warehouse looking for them.

But it’s still exhausting. It’s getting hotter too, so I spend most of the day sweaty and thirsty. Today seemed like it would never end. We can’t leave until it’s all done because the truck has to go. The guy who’s in charge of the dock was even running around trying to help us because he’s the very last to leave. Finally it was time to clean up. I even swept an extra aisle because the guy it belonged to was busy doing something else. Then my trainer asked me to stack pallets for the forklift driver to move. I picked one up, but the guy on the forklift told me to leave that one because it was the wrong size.

So I dropped the pallet… like an idiot, on my toe. Embarrassed, I pretended like it had missed me. But I couldn’t walk without limping. By then it was time to clock out, and I limped down the depth of the warehouse to the parking lot. It hurt so bad, I took off my shoe to investigate. It hurt, but it didn’t hurt like a break… at least, I didn’t think so. It doesn’t hurt too much if I stay still, but if I flex any muscles attached to my right little toe, it hurts like heck. I’m wondering if I really did break it. But I think there’s not much you can do for a broken little toe, except maybe tape it up.

I told my team leader about it (he’s an interesting character I’ll have to write about later), and he said to tell me how it was doing tomorrow. It stinks because my job requires me to be on my feet all day. This is going to slow me down a lot.