What in the hell are Skwinkles?!
Atlanta Bonded Warehouse is a cross between a walk-in freezer, a public library, and an international airport.
I had forgotten that when I get up early to do something important, I get caffeine jitters. I don't actually drink coffee; I just get this giddy adrenaline rush that makes me talk real fast and slur my words while my hands are vibrating like I'm Lewis Black. But I got there on time.
Almost didn't, because driving around and around the sprawling place I couldn't find the prescribed entrance.
First impressions:
Not as cold as I expected. Everything is white. Very clean. Quiet. Howling in distance. The ceiling is very, very, high. Why is there no chocolate smell?
Skipping the lengthly orientation where I figured out what the hell was going on, my job broke down like this:
Sometime next week a group of VIPs from M&M-Mars are coming by for an inspection. Everything must be PERFECT. The temp agency- Royal Staffing- is apparently responsible for running an entire department of around forty people at ABW called 'co-pack'. I do not know what they do there, as in the past two days I've never been there when they do it. But it seems to involve packing. Except that everything is already packed when it gets there. Anyway, ABW asked RS to hire some extra hands to clean for the inspection. There are four of us, and we wait in the break room while the co-pack people get to work. The Manager in charge (a woman) puts us under a middle-aged lady who is to herd the cleaners around. We get a two-cent tour. There are many, many boxes. For a warehouse, the place is incredibly clean. We spend eight hours bleaching the walls, wiping down garbage cans, sweeping out the loading wells, and spit-shining other highly visible surfaces. Then I come back next day, we have twice as many cleaning people, we do the same thing. Now I am tired.
Impressions from the two-cent tour:
Co-pack is tucked into one corner of the warehouse; as we walk away from it the first thing she tells us is, "Watch out for the forklifts. They're not used to you being out here on the floor- they're used to looking for the tops of other forklifts, and they'll just come flying around the corner without looking." As she says this a mutant forklift zooms by at thirty-five miles per hour.
'Humungus' cannot describe the building. The warehouse is made of 'rooms' each around fifty-thousand square feet, or one small Wal-Mart. (half a Super Wal-Mart) Some are bigger. There are about ten rooms total.
The rooms are filled with pallet racks, mostly full. To those who don't know, pallet racks are like huge steel skeletons of bookshelves, and pallets are flat wooden boxes that anything you want a forklift to grab must be stacked on. The forklift skewers the pallet, and lifts it and the load together. These particular pallet racks are around thirty feet high; imagine being a foot high, walking through the stacks of a library. Many, many, many boxes.
More mutant forklifts continuously go by from and in all directions, as we get to the central room, number four. There is a big counter in the center of the wall along the main corridor. The counter is covered with computers and men stand there typing and radioing and frowning at pieces of paper. This command center is surrounded by four-foot high bright yellow reinforced concrete posts, spaced about a meter and a half apart. On the other side of the corridor I immediately recognize a time machine about to depart.
Of course it's not a time machine, but it takes me a moment to guess what it is. There is this black gallows-shaped (and sized) frame rising two and a half meters from a block of machinery, and from the frame hangs an L-shaped boom that is spooned by the frame and reaches back down to the floor. There is more machinery on the boom. The boom is whirling around in a circle every other second, and on the floor in the center of the the boom's circle of revolution is a pallet loaded with boxes. It looks like something from
Stargate or
Timeline or
Minority Report or any one of the movies and/or television series which involved time-traveling law enforcement.
I realize that it is a pallet-wrapper.
Pallet wrapping usually involves a worker holding a two-liter bottle sized roll of Saran-Wrap and walking around a pallet twenty times. The wrapping ensures that none of the boxes get loose, and it works much better than straps. The boom on the time machine in fact holds a giant roll of plastic which it adjusts the height of to completely cover the pallet; in a few seconds the pallet looks like an unfortunate fly. Afterward, the time machine is in my eye an immobilized spider.
The lady points out the cold rooms- now I realize some of the building is, in fact, kept at forty degrees. We approach a barn door-size opening covered over with a curtain of heavy strips of transparent plastic. We're keeping near the racks to avoid the traffic; suddenly the curtain snaps open like bat's wings and a mutant forklift shoots out; in a second the curtain snaps shut again. I feel a wave of cool air. I think of the batcave exit.
You know all those times you've stuck your head in the freezer on a hot day, wishing you could climb inside? Of course, anyone who has used a meat locker has experienced this, but it's fun when the freezer is the size of a department store. All the doors are transparent plastic; they all have impressive ways of snapping open as soon as something approaches.
Impressions on the work:
Many people manage to get very far into life unexposed to continuous physical labor; when they run up against it for the first time, they're overwhelmed by it and totally unable to cope. I'm out of practice- and out of shape- but luckily I had that lesson years ago, working for my dad. With physical labor, the more repetitive and mindless, the better. Nothing beats carrying heavy loads from point A to point B. Because to the extent that your thoughts don't have to address what you're doing, they can be about anything you want. My first job, which I got when I was a senior in high school, was shelving books in the children's department at the central branch of the
Cobb County Public Library. It was brain-liquefying. Because to see where the books went, you had to be constantly alphabetizing them in your head. You were forced to concentrate entirely on the work to do it; yet it was mind-numbingly boring. And the books themselves didn't help either; children's stories have such great hooks, and I very often had to stop myself from reading them then and there.
*Ahem*. I was talking about the warehouse: The work was comfortably monotonous. I got into the wax-on, wax-off motions and listened to the background noises of the warehouse. Depending on the hybrid, when a mutant forklift was approaching its electric howl sounded like an airliner taking off, and when retreating it sounded like an ambulance. At intervals the PA would squawk something unintelligible.
The mutant forklifts did one of two things: zoom up to a shelf or pallet strewn floor, pause, snatch a pallet, and zoom off again or zoom up to a shelf or pallet strewn floor, pause, drop a pallet, and zoom off again. The constant motion and lack of apparent direction gave one the impression that the warehouse didn't actually ship pallets; it just shuffled them to look busy. Like an ant hill twiddling its fingers.
Something which you (By which I mean "I") kept forgetting was that the place was a Mecca of candy. There was no smell of chocolate at all; they kept the place very clean. But you could see the product variety logos and read the content information printed on the boxes. So let's say you look at one box on a pallet and it has the "Crispy M&M's Chocolate Candies" logo. There are one hundred bags in that box. There are one hundred boxes on that pallet. A large rack holds about one hundred pallets. If a bag of crispy M&M's holds one hundred candies, that's ONE HUNDRED MILLION CRISPY M&M'S CHOCOLATE CANDIES
on just one rack. I don't even really like crispy M&M's. I like peanut M&M's much better. And the next shelf is Three Musketeers. I hate Three Musketeers. That rack holds FIFTEEN HUNDRED THOUSAND THREE MUSKETEERS CANDY BARS. But the next one holds almond M&M's, so I'm happy. Not everything there was M&M-Mars; I saw pallets with Pedigree Dry Dog Food and Uncle Ben's Brown Rice. (ONE BILLION RICE GRAINS!)
I was back in a 'room' seemingly devoted to M&M-Mars, spit-shining the rack ends, when I came across a few pallets loaded with brightly-dyed boxes bearing a logo for "
Skwinkles". There was some adspeak on the box to the effect of "They're sooooo yummy!!!". I started having flashbacks to
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac background jokes. Taco Hell. Cherry Brain Freezies.
What in the hell are Skwinkles?!?!?! They sound like
Skittles laced with
Ecstasy.
I know this is the internet and the answer to my quandary is mere minutes away, but I don't want to subject myself to this horror. Feel free to Google it if you're feeling masochistic.
We only worked in the cold rooms once, at the end of today. I was hot enough from working that I never got cold, but I got very, very stiff and I couldn't feel my ears. Dead-tired and hobbling around in the endless freezer, looking for another garbage can to wipe down, I actually got lost and circled around to where I had started from without realizing it. I started to get paranoid as I came upon garbage cans that looked like they'd already been cleaned; I completely freaked out when I found myself looking through the door I'd come through, from the opposite side. Luckily, it was time to go home.
I have to rest. Goodbye now.
