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May 2000. Graduation, woo-hoo! The next day I went right back to working for $5.65 and spent the
entire day plotting my way back into the jungle to hide out amongst the human trees, paid but unappreciated.
That's the way I wanted it, no relationships, no nagging thoughts, just work for eight hours then be out.
Getting back in was more difficult than I thought, due partially to the disorganized nature of the staffing
agency, which always seemed to be working one day after experiencing a major earthquake.
At first it wasn't so bad. My brother and a few friends started at the same time. We worked in roughly
the same area and at lunch time we would become The Round Table of Discontent. Complaining about how
there's never a good time to take a shit (there were only two bathrooms were accessible to up to 1200
floor employees at a time), the huge "Night of the Lepus" sized dust bunnies hiding in the bins where
we scanned and stowed books with Star Trek style phasers, broken, tetanus shot inducing pallets and
the usual corporate runaround. The worst was how Amazon tried to remain the cool underdog, and yet I
would still receive answers like "We're still waiting on clarification for you to take that empty cart,
Mike."
But the most obvious topic of discussion were the people. Not everyone in general, specific people
with real names. The first was Joe, a hard jawed old metal kid and terrible dresser. He was the one
Skid Row sang about in "18 and Life." He lifted weights to beat up the neighborhood dogs and to
defend himself from homosexual hobos as he drank his dad's beer and walked the railroad tracks.
He always cut the sleeves off his t-shirts, and in the case of his Metallica Kill 'Em All shirt,
crooked, to show off his buff arms and his tattoos, one of which was a skull and the other was probably
a knife with blood on it. Joe was always in the forming a loogie when he wasn't busy yelling something like
"Can't I get a straight answer from anybody around here?!" The funny thing was, I don't ever recall anyone
ever asking him anything. Joe was definitely someone I avoided as he displayed fierce territorial nature
by leaving four-knuckled imprints on all the cardboard boxes he passed. He was my enemy, he tried to hit
on my friend Tricia so I wrote his name in the stall of the bathroom, after a previous visitor had
instructed me that if I was gay, to write my name here.
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