this was originally posted on tumblr and ao3. it's also partially based on my own experience working in factories. man no wonder boxie is my favorite ghost
You didn't spend your life obsessed with boxes. Oh fuck no. You had dreams, man: aspirations. You know, for like, middle management or something. Alright, so you didn't have big dreams. When you were first hired on at the factory though, they put you in packaging.
There's not really enough to keep your mind occupied, working in packaging. The routine is easy, numbing, repetitious to the extreme on a twelve hour shift, and so you end up focusing on the boxes you fold open, tape shut. How perfectly you can square up the flaps, slap the tape on even and smooth across the bottom, a perfect flip through your fingertips. Slipping the product in, easy, and then shut, another smooth motion of tape across the top: a perfect box. Beautiful.
Slipping the boxes onto the pallet give you something else to focus on while your mind wanders. Lining the edges of the boxes up with the slats of wood, making sure the stacks are straight, even, perfectly aligned. It's satisfying, creating the perfect pallet, it gives you a sense of fulfillment that, at the end of the day, makes you feel kinda dumb. You spend your days stacking fucking boxes, holy shit, no one cares about how well you stack the damn things, but.
It's a job, and you do it well, and for twelve fifty an hour straight out of high school, it's not as terrible as it could be even when you're convinced you can feel brain cells dying of boredom.
And hey, your dedication and obvious care for your job lands you a promotion to shipping, where you get to drive a forklift around, and holy shit that's surprisingly fun. Those things spin on a dime, almost literally, you tested it out. You take to spinning your lift around fast, when there's a lull in the workflow. You start making a habit of take corners too fast sometimes, and drive through the warehouse at full speed all the time, especially when it's unnecessary. You try not to think about the time you drove through a puddle on the concrete from a leaky air conditioner and the stripped, shitty wheels of your forks lost traction, and you almost crashed into a wall.
That would have been a mandatory drug test. God you hate peeing in a cup.
You kind of get well known, around the plant, as a bit reckless, but fast, and with exceptionally few mistakes at recording inventory changes, so they let it slide. And in a couple years you are settled comfortably into the job, whipping your little forklift around the plant, barely even noting the masses of inventory you handle every day beyond the necessity of recording department transfers into the database. You couldn't care less about how perfectly the edges line up.
It's kind of ironic, what kills you. You always figured it'd be crashing the forklift. But nope. Instead you'd just been walking through the warehouse, chatting with the supervisor, when another forklift driver slips on a puddle from that same faulty AC, rams into the rack you're strolling by, and rattles the thing enough to destabilize a poorly stacked, unshrinkwrapped pallet on the top level, and the first couple rows of boxes fall off.
Bam, right on your head.
And the last thought that trickles through your head is how wonderfully square the boxes are. Fucking BOXES goddamn.