Tales from the Underpaid: the Cherrypicker
A home-improvement warehouse is a dangerous place. The ads make it look like friendly folks in aprons will show you how to fix your ceiling fan, and that’s true. I saw a lot of good moments in that job, like the guy who sat on the concrete floor with a kid who had broken his skateboard and worked a pair of washers and nuts on to the axle to get it rolling again.
But memory enshrines the frightening and bizarre in sharper light, and what I remember best from that time is the mayhem the environment engenders.
Like the time a manager was demonstrating the safety harness that had been added to the cherrypicker lift. This was a basket lift, where a person could be put up into the twelve-foot racking to pick smaller pieces of stock, one box at a time instead of a pallet of goods. The introduction of this lift to stores all over the country had created a new class of insurance case, so the manufacturer and OSHA got together to create a better harness, with five points including two that looped under the picker’s legs.
My manager wanted to show us the difference between the old and the new, to explain why we couldn’t use the old harness anymore; just a stout belt that went around the picker’s middle. To illustrate, he belted the old harness around himself, jacked the lift up ten feet, and jumped.
The old harness pulled tight around his middle and we saw him folded and squeezed in mid-air, like a tube of toothpaste in a toddler’s careless fist. An assistant manager ran to him, and we heard his strangled voice say “…hospital now…” before he passed out.
I never saw that guy again.
A different location, a different manager was trying to attach flag garlands running from the front of our building to the first row of parking by tying them to the lightposts. Not satisfied with the height a scissor lift might have offered, he directed a forkilift driver to build him a stage of loose 2×4×8s and let him stand on it, then put the whole thing: forks, stage, and manager up 24 feet into the air to help him stand there, no saftey gear on, and tie the garland.
And here’s the thing about a job like that: I didn’t say a word. I didn’t complain and I didn’t report, because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d be the one punished for it. This was the job where the managements openly called the all-women cashier team “the Harem.” The job where the kid whose job it was to fetch and shag carts out of parking spaces back into the building was called “Lot Rat” to his face. The job where the as-yet unhired member of the team was listed on the scheduled as “FNG",” short for “fuckin’ new guy.” The job where the actual order forms described store use items as “BFS” and “RBFS” for “big fucking sign” and “really big fucking sign.” Rule-followers and anyone who insisted on their dignity was simply shut up or fired. I took a picture of this towering infraction, but I never showed it to anyone.
This job also allowed me, every once in a while, to solve a mystery. One memorable morning, I went to the receiving bay at the back of the store: a concrete cavern big enough to take in goods from the open rear roll-up doors of eighteen wheelers, to find a man lying in a pool of blood.
Rick had been driving a forklift over the treacherous gap between building a truck, a job we had all done a hundred times. But somewhere in that process, he’d taken a terrible head injury. His scalp was split at the coronal suture and he was out cold, after having unbuckled and slid from the cab of the lift. There was no blood on the forks of his machine, or any other obvious instrument of injury. He had managed to turn his lift off, forks on the floor. The ambulance took him away, but we couldn’t tell them much.
Until we reviewed the video.
On the video, we saw the top of Rick’s head, shiny and bald, as he advanced and reversed in and out of this truck. One trip showed us his hard lean forward, out of the cage of the lift, as he worked with concentration on something inside the trailer. As he pulled back, the freak accident: the roll-door of the truck came down without warning or interference, cracking him on the top of his head and bouncing back into position.
Woozy, he pulled out. On the poor-quality suveillance video, his blood was black as it ran down his neck and shoulders. He put his forks on the floor and killed the machine. He slid down, blood sliming the seat and the cage. When we went back to the scene of the crime, we saw the edge of the roll-door, blood and hair clinging to it above our heads.
One last one, because it always makes me laugh. I was ringing up a customer with a huge cart of hundreds of small PVC fittings and plumbing parts. She had a little girl with her, maybe four years old. The kid was old enough to walk around on her own, but I cannot stress this to you enough, reader: NEVER let a kid out of your sight in a warehouse store. This is a funny story; many of them are not.
Anyhow, this kid was chinning herself on the checkout counter, and I figured all was well enough. Her mother and I were sifting through the cart, getting everything rung up. Nothing on my counter was sharp or dangerous; I didn’t worry that the child was behind me.
When we both turned back to check the total, the girl was finishing off an upended bottle of hand sanitizer, squeezing it like a Capri Sun.
Listen, don’t ask me how she got past the nasty taste and the burn of ethanol. She just did, pounding the whole thing away in the space of seconds. To the mother’s credit, she didn’t freak out. Together, we called Poison Control. Together, we heard them say: the kid has had two shots of hard liquor. Make her drink water and let her sleep it off.
I saw her scoop the kid up on her hip and drive the cart with one hand. I did not charge her for the hand sanitizer.
(The Home Depot, still extant, 2008-2012)