Lessons Learned Working at a Warehouse

One thing I learned from this job, and the many warehouse, retail, and food service jobs I had thereafter, is to refrain from assuming that most people's work lives are anything like mine and yours.

Workers like little Louie and Old Joe, the bookie, the thieves, the truck drivers… We live and work among them.

We also live and work among the women getting harassed on the street; the legions of exhausted commuters; the transportation workers taking flack from those commuters when they can’t stick to schedules they don’t control; tradespeople suffering injury or indignity, whether it’s being stabbed by a pen in their soap or something worse; and the gamblers sacrificing their paychecks to dreams of easy street.