Confessions of a Serial Interviewer by Steven Ra Ga

From the time I was 18yrs of age to 24 I held various jobs that involved working in a warehouse.

I had flunked out of College on the account of drinking too much and not knowing where I wanted to go with a career.

As a result I needed a job and with a high school education all I could qualify for was Warehouse jobs unless I wanted to work on the Rigs, but I avoided that like COVID.

My friends at the time would tell me stories from up north. How the big the bugs were, the violence, the pay, loosing fingers. They basically made it seem like a nightmare working environment.

So warehouse it was. One of my 1st jobs in a warehouse was Future Shop the brother of Best Buy.

Future Shop was a weird place, the job was like typical duties, stocking shelves and unloading trucks.

It’s actually where I met my best friend Larry, he and I would have many, many drunken adventures and fishing trips over the years.

While working Larry and I bonded over who could injure the other more, not on purpose, but we always seemed to accidentally hurt one another.

Weather it be an elbow to the face, getting smacked with a large speaker while turning or running into someone with a skid loader. Someone always got hurt.

This one time though neither of us got hurt but our coworkers did.

This one day a guy (Jon) who was little about 5’4” and maybe 90lbs worked in the warehouse, that day they were unloading the truck taking skids off with a pallet jacket.

Everything is normal but the gate (ramp) always had a bump in it, so you had to slow down on your approach otherwise the skid would tip and you would spend hours picking broken items.

Jon was at the base of the dock, counting inventory while Larry was inside the truck. Larry started to move a skid off the truck but was coming to fast, the skid hit the bump and went up and over it sped down the ramp and crushed poor Jon between to skids as he leaped up to get out of the way. Jon wasn’t too badly hurt.

Another time our manage Kevin was unloading a tall large skid and something similar happened. The skid hit the bump and rocketed off the pallet smashing Kevin in the shoulder.

That place was crazy.

Another time there was a garbage strike and cardboard started piling up in the warehouse it got so problematic that it was like a giant wall of cardboard. We had to use shrink wrap to hold it up. Until the management finally told use to get it out of the shop. We filled up the bay outside with it enough that we started taking turns doing flips on to it like it was a ball pit.

This is when I found a box filled with cameras and cell phones. I recall taking the box to our manager and asking if we are suppose to throw away new tech, this is when management caught on their was a thief among us.

Eventually Jon was caught stealing. He apparently had been stealing items for a very long time and hiding them all over the shop. The camera security was so bad you would have show the item you are stealing just to get caught.

Another time the store owner sat on this empty box and fell inside, hilarious.

Future Shop was like any department store it had a collective of lost souls looking for a place to calm home. After quitting I eventually came back for two other seasons. My final season I had enough, I got paid $8.50 an hour but when they hired new staff they would pay them $10 per hour, I tried to get a raise but that wasn’t in my cards so I office spaced the fuck out, I stopped showing up on time and generally stopped carrying. There was this other guy who worked at the warehouse he was older than me and South Korean, his English was okay, his story was he had moved to Calgary for love and the daughter he wanted to marry, her father didn’t like Bob so he sent the girls Uncle to our city to get a job in the same facility to keep and eye on him, or so that was the story, he could have been North Korean for all I know. I bring him up because one Monday it was inventory day, you come in at 5am and count every time in the store, it goes by kinda fast if you have a few guys. Bob and I were scheduled to come in, and I didn’t care and more, so I showed up at 9am when I got there Bob looked at me from the rafters and in his broken English he yells Fuck You Steven, I couldn’t help myself but burst into laughter. Hahaha Bob.

Another time there was a guy named Nick who was from China, we loved talking with Nick he would reach us mandarin and we would teach him English. Nick and Bob used to fight, they would tell another to fuck off in their broken English it was too funny to witness.

Larry was always good a hiding. He would arrange TVs in the back on the shelves to sleep on during his shifts.

Years later I work for Larry at his current job, we do carpentry work here and there to help him take his mind off his bizarre marriage, without airing too much dirty laundry, he found his wife has been having infidelity and has also come out as non binary… life is a social construct… poor Larry.

My life though has been an adventure one interview and job after another… I should have been an actor they lead similar lives.

For a spell I worked at a well known brand name water supplier in there warehouse. They only hired me but they should have hire 2-3 people as the job had a lot of responsibilities. At the time I had just flunked out of college and needed something. This position seemed fitting. It was a company that supplied those 50lbs water jugs mostly to office water coolers, they also do water tanks and later coffee, also this weird acid solution for septic tanks. The interview was weird my managers name was Bob, when he introduced me to the sales team and other management team, he would say “so this guy is Bob, and that guy is Bob and this other guy is Bob.” I thought he was taking a piss, having a laugh or pulling my leg (prank or joke) on me, but no he was serious. He managed to hire other people who had the name Bob…

My role was simple, operate the forklift, unload trucks that had new water, load trucks that had no water or used. Unload trucks that had new equipment for the sale team, clean the the water heater tanks, help customers who came to the mobile window to pick up, water and salt for water softener tanks, keep the warehouse clean, rotate the salt pallets – and mix chemicals for the septic tanks.

At first it wasn’t all the bad, I worked hard in the summer, in the winter things got tough. I needed a car to get to work but I couldn’t afford one so I would take the bus and train and walk, often I would be so cold I would have unthaw my legs 20mins before a shift started.

As the job dragged on, I had numerous encounters with older men who were hardens by their life choices who told me I should go to art school (kinda like that Ben afflict scene in good will hunting where he tells Matt Damond to just fuck off and leave town, because he is too smart to break bricks for a living) anyway I ultimately did listen, but now I am back where I started (another story for another time).

While at the water company I recall many a day when I would be set to move a stack of salt that weighed over 2,000lbs with the forklift and as I went to raise it off the stack, the pallet would bust in half and the salt bags would poor out all over the place. I would then spend an hour lifting each 50lbs bag and put it back on to a new pallet. It sucked when that would happen and then a customer would come to the window for their order or a truck would come at the same time. I was always scrambling around the warehouse trying to do everything.

I can’t recall how long I stayed at that job but I quit after they started adding too many responsibilities and not enough extra pay. This was back when minimum wage was $7 per hour so maybe I was making $9

The company decided they wanted to take on coffee for companies so I used to have to add coffee inventory to my already packed list of duties. There would be like 30 coffee pots that had to be sanitized and washed before they could be sent out. And since the company was cheap, I would have to line them up on the ground in rows, fill each individually with water and solution, run off and fulfill all my duties, run back to cleans and dry theme so they were ready for the next go. When I asked for more staff or help I got rejected…

Soon after I stopped carrying, I would rip donuts in the parking lot with the forklift, stomp, jump and run all over the salt towers, purposely damage water jugs because it was fun to watch them explode because I wanted to get fired. They never did fire me, it was like a scene from the movie office space. So eventually I just left…

I can’t seem to recall other warehouse positions that were strictly that. I do however have had positions that included some warehouse duties…

I will do those in another post.