fine whine

Despite my mental backlog of subjects to cover and movies to review, I still am at a loss for motivation to type up a daily entry. That said, here's part of an email I sent Paul Davidson, author of Consumer Joe: Harassing Corporate America one letter at a time. He'd asked what it is, exactly, that I did.

I thought I'd send a simple short answer to him, and I started typing...

(It's a decent enough story, one that I've never told so thoroughly, so I figured I'd just put it up here for posterity, and to stave off needing to write anything new for yet another day.)

Would you believe that I work for Corporate America? I work for a large garment company (third largest in women's denim) in something of a technical position, measuring, inspecting and evaluating men's and women's jeanswear. Which basically means I end up answering or dodging a lot of emails, mostly from the vendors we use south of the border and overseas. So that's the "what", the easiest of the questions to answer. The "why" stymies me, so I'll move to the "how" instead, as I had no prior experience in the garment industry before taking this position (unless eighth grade home economics class counts). It's an interesting story, really, but a long one.

In short, I needed to have a job in Ohio for my wife to get the in-state tuition rate for grad school. With a month at my disposal to land a computer engineering or IT job, I nevertheless found myself scrambling about town on the last few days, classifieds in hand (I did get a lot of movies watched, though). The day I was hired I had two opportunities, one a job in a warehouse and the other restocking Pepsi vending machines. As fate would have it, Pepsi was further away.

So I stood around with a bunch of excited people next to a squat black building.
Many of them seemed to know what was going on, and most were excited about the clothing discounts such a job would bring (I get up to 40% off at a decent number of places) and full of stories of friends and acquaintances who'd worked and so on. Nobody could really say what it was that merchandise handlers and outbound loaders were supposed to do, of course.

The weather was nice, though, so I wasn't against the whole standing-around-and-filling-out-an-application idea. If I were to do it over I think I'd bring a frisbee. Eventually I made it into the lobby, and had a discussion with a hiring guy who then signed me up for the morning shift, with the title of merchandise handler. I left knowing little more than when I had arrived about what I was to be doing--but I was now employed, which was the whole point of this exercise.

Days later, at seven o'clock sharp, I began my brief career as a merchandise handler in the cart preparation area of one of our distribution centers. Lest the suspense kill you, what I did for several months was cut open cardboard boxes, scan barcodes, and count pairs of jeans, shirts, underwear and the like. Really engaging stuff. Fortunately I was able to bend the rules and listen to books on CD and music, and I have to admit, being the only guy walking around a warehouse smiling at Bill Cosby's jokes before breakfast is an experience that everybody should have at one time or another.

Eventually they realized my talents were wasted, or I complained enough about inefficient systems, that they decided to give me a shot at another department. I soon became star student in the power equipment training classes. I learned how to drive pallet jacks, "high/lows" (like a forklift, but able to go much higher) and stock pickers (again like a forklift, but the cab raises, not just the forks). Fun stuff. I was a great driver and enjoyed that probably as much as I've enjoyed any job. Times change, particularly in the seasonally-driven fashion industry, and for a while it seemed that I might have no future with the warehouse and then, only a bleak one. I returned to the box-cutting and counting (and audiobooks) for some time, but I started getting pulled away from my duties for special projects, be they palletizing remnants, sweeping floors or lugging around boxes of labels.

One such project catapulted me out of the warehouse altogether and into the
task of sorting hanging pairs of jeans for "the office people". It was a whole different world to us "DC people" and I milked it for all it was worth. As they did with anybody who had spare time in the offices, they had me measuring garments before long and somehow my attention to detail and keen eye slipped through.

I knew those years of copy editing would pay off somehow.

So I quickly made myself indispensable for an understaffed department. And
that's how I, a computer engineer by training, got into the garment industry.