it's like mountain climbing ... but not.
I spent the early part of Saturday morning in a Salvation Army warehouse strewing tarps across refugee supplies awaiting sorting and distribution. Thunderstorm was expected for later that evening and the warehouse roof leaks like a sieve. The place is cavernous, the warehouse foreman says that it can house two 747s parked nose to tail; and it is piled up to twenty feet high with cardboard boxes. Ladders were in short supply so, in most cases, it was less like tarping and more like mountain climbing on pallets. I'm on my knees half the time, to distribute my weight more evenly, balancing on top of a fifteen foot high stack of paper towels while hauling hundreds of feet of heavy blue plastic. Then scrabbling and looking for hand and foot holds as I climb another five feet to pull the tarp higher. Paper towels are surprisingly stable when bundled in case lots. Used clothing less so; it's like quicksand, and there's a small part of my brain that expects a false move and a sudden plunge into a well of musty blue jeans.
The foreman tells us that maybe 10 out of the 10,000 boxes in the warehouse were packed by assholes who want to fuck with the Christian charities. The milder assholes have slipped Satanic literature and pornography into their donation box. The nastier ones scattered straight razors amongst boxes of candy. I don't know if that's true or not, but it isn't fun to contemplate such possibilities when the boxes sag underneath me.
The foreman tells us that maybe 10 out of the 10,000 boxes in the warehouse were packed by assholes who want to fuck with the Christian charities. The milder assholes have slipped Satanic literature and pornography into their donation box. The nastier ones scattered straight razors amongst boxes of candy. I don't know if that's true or not, but it isn't fun to contemplate such possibilities when the boxes sag underneath me.