That field over there used to be a huge warehouse. They kept parts in it, like an eddy in a stream that would come and go. The parts were for copy machines and cameras and printers and other imaging stuff … I think even medical imagery parts, like those for a mammogram – at least I remember some jokes about it when the parts would come in. Now it’s been imploded. The Company downsized, outsourced somewhere with fresher people and didn’t need this place so it was demolished.
Before that though, I worked there as a contractor. There was a guy there named Raymond who drove the forklift. Well, he drove a forklift and did other things too, like parts-put-away and pulled orders and stuff. I helped him with this sometimes. He was nice enough, but a little strange. He didn’t like his job; he called it monotonous and boring and tedious. He told me stories about working construction, what he used to do, a man’s job he said not this box monkey crap he wasted his life with now. It’s true his job wasn’t super interesting. Faulty parts would come in from field technicians, those parts would wait here until enough collected then they would be shipped out to be repaired somewhere overseas. When the parts came in they would be logged into the computer system and then labeled with a printed out piece of paper and masking tape. Raymond would take these labeled parts and find somewhere in the warehouse to put them; record the part’s i.d. number and the location. That was pretty much the extent of it.
Raymond often said strange things, strange enough at least that I remember them. Things like, there’s too much history here or a man needs a skill to be a man. A skill, he said, was like a callous in your nerves or a hard spot on the brain like a carpenter’s palm. With a skill, he said, you can take your time, work like a song. Not with us though, he said, we’re just spongy machines in a dusty place where things are just done but not made. His habit for saying these strange things put people off, he responded to this by giving them mean nicknames. Lucy, the batty old woman who worked at one of the processing computers he called a few screws Lucy and Pete, another contractor like me but with a hearing aid, he called Re-Pete. He was unpleasant but he didn’t bother me too much.
I remember one thing he said that I really liked, and he recognized that I liked it and that’s probably why we got along. The small parts went in a section of the warehouse with very tall racks that you had to get a rolling staircase to get to the top of. All the parts were packed tightly in the cubbies in the racks with their transfer tickets - those pieces of printed-out-paper – all facing foreword so that the racks looked like a giant white hedge or something. Currents of air would ruffle the tickets in waves and you would think of a grove of trees or maybe fresh air. Some of the older tickets – when the glue on the tap had degraded – would come loose and float down to the floor. I was working with Raymond one time when a lot of the tickets were coming off and he said it was a bleached autumn. This was the death of dead parts. He said now they were ghosts in a no part world. I don’t know why, exactly, that I liked it but Raymond appreciated that I did.
Inside the boxes, the field technicians that returned the parts had to include a note or more like a printed form that indicated the identity of the part – what it was used for or what it belonged to – and what default it had. We were not required to look at them, only the processors at the computers were. But when things got slow sometimes you would, just out of curiosity. There were field technicians from places like Italy , China and Japan or Southern California or Ohio . It was neat to look at them, look at the hand writing and imagine the person who wrote it. I noticed how Europeans wrote their ones – like little triangles almost. Raymond was usually so efficient in putting away that he had plenty of time to kill. He often reorganized old sloppy put-away locations or pulled decommissioned parts for scrap. And he read those service technician notes like they were newspapers. He said they were the key to being proactive, that you could find patterns that tell you what the best locations were for which parts. He said if only people we’re more attentive we could figure out which ones were the most frequently rotated and put them closest to the shipping area and the least the furthest away.
It was right around the time that the rumors of the warehouse being shut down first started to circulate that Raymond told me that his brother was a field tech. He said he lived on the west coast and had been working on copiers for ten years and that he hadn’t seen him in about that much time. He told me that he had been sending parts for years. Raymond said that he had collected almost every note his brother had included in returned parts – not knowing why at first – but then discovering that there was a pattern to it. He tried to explain, but I really didn’t understand, that somehow by returning certain parts that had certain serial numbers his brother had been sending him a code. He told me a story about an ancient Greek who tattooed a message on a servant’s shaved head and then dispatched him after his hair grew back. That was the idea here, he said. His brother was sending him a message but it was important so it had to be hidden. It was important he said, because it was a brilliant idea, one that would make them both rich. Raymond’s brother needed him because he knew he could rely on him – not just his loyalty but his intelligence too. The idea had something to do with logistics, the shipping and storing of parts, a business they both knew something about. They were developing a plan that would make warehouses obsolete by making everything a constant flow. He drew a diagram for me, but it just looked like a circle to me. Raymond said the plan wasn’t complete that his brother hadn’t sent the last of his coded message. Raymond didn’t know yet how to get in contact with him or how they were going to get the operation off the ground. He swore me to secrecy but asked me to be on the look out for his brother’s notes.
It wasn’t too long after that, that management started telling the contractors that we would be let go first since they had a legal obligation to make us the first in the rounds of layoffs. Two days before my last day there, they already were having tours for the engineers from Ohio, where the logistics operation was being moved to. Before I left Raymond confessed to me that he was panicked, that he needed to get the last of his brother's notes, management was ruining everything. I did what I could to calm him. I suggested maybe he could get a job in the new warehouse in Ohio, but he looked at me as if I had changed into someone else who didn’t understand him anymore. I heard that, a couple weeks after I left, Raymond used his forklift to topple one of the parts racks onto a group of touring engineers and then climbed to the top of another one before security showed up, then he jumped off backwards and died against the concrete floor.
