Confessions of One Who Worked the Door

I recently covered for the carryout door and I couldn’t help but be flooded with memories of when I first started 7 years ago in this position and of carrying orders out to the masses. I started thinking of the little things like having to sweep up two or three times a week the packing peanut bits that escaped out the edge of the boxes or risk being buried in them, or that I used to always get a laugh at the fact the last rack was labeled “yxz” and stayed that way up to this last year when they made new big letters to label each rack. I also always chuckled at the fact that you could set your watch by the flow of customer service people from upstairs coming out of the door by the carryout door right at 5pm every day. I remember the few Fridays when the warehouse people wouldn’t come in and it would be eerily quiet and lonely. I repressed it until now but I used to fear that I’d either not hear the bell meaning a person has driven up or that the bell wouldn’t sound either way leaving the person out there waiting. This only happened two times out of the hundreds of cars that went across that cord to ring the bell but it still haunted me. I still to this day find myself going to a door every time a bell rings. Okay, maybe I’m not that brainwashed but not far from it.

I find myself wanting to tell whoever is working the door now that “you have it easy nowadays kid”. Looking around at the carryout area in the new building it seems to have been designed with function in mind but much can be said to the opposite of the previous building. For one thing, the door you had to go in and out a million times a day, which was a regular metal door not an automatic sliding door, was not level with the parking lot resulting in having to go up and down a set of 4 steps or maneuver a dolly or that red cart down a ramp that had you turn 180 degrees in the middle. I remember the first week I was working the door I was getting a stack of orders for a consultant. Being new I hadn’t yet learned how many boxes I could stack on just a dolly and so I tried to get all the orders on one trip, which ended up being 2 boxes to high. I had made it carefully all the way down the ramp and even past the turn but when I went to set the dolly down at the bottom the whole stack kept going forward and toppled over. I saw my future at company falling with all of those boxes onto the ground. The person that I was getting all of the boxes for was either a husband or a male consultant, I can’t remember, but instead of getting mad he just helped me pick up the boxes and load them into the car. The other thing that wasn’t quite right with other building was that the shipping station, where the orders came off the line, and carryout were not close together like they are now. I can remember having to pull and stain to bring the carts full of orders off the shipping station down what seemed like a mile to carryout. If that wasn’t bad enough, there were times when we had too many orders and had to pile them on skids sometimes five or six boxes high and bring those down by hand jack. When we got to the point of having to use skids that also meant that we did not have any room on the regular racks for them. At that point all that we could do was to put a number on the floor in front of the skid and a corresponding number on the card for the boxes on that skid. While it was quite easier to put up orders this way it made it twice as difficult to retrieve orders from these piles. Quite to my luck most of the time the order I would be looking for would be at the bottom and I would have to unbury it to get it out.

As you can tell by now, the company was quite busy at the time when I first started. I remember standing at the top of the ramp just outside the door when I finally finished off a line of cars and leaning up against the railing just looking at the empty parking lot where the consultants would park. I thought many times about how I needed to take a picture of this sight and use it as some sort of Zen moment for later. We would get so busy at times that the line cars would extend out into the street. If it got busy enough I could page the warehouse saying I needed help but that wouldn’t always bring someone due to one reason or another. I found an odd sense of peace when I gave up trying to get help or knowing that there was no help and focused only on getting the line taken care of. I believe it was because I would get so stressed out trying to get help that it eased my mind when I could say to myself “all you can do is what you can to help these people”. I still use this lesson to this day when I find myself busy. When I started I was trained how to help cars three, sometimes four, at a time. The trick was to separate the cars by placing the first car’s cards between your thumb and index finger then the next car’s between your index finger and your middle finger and so on. When getting the orders you had to remember to stack the orders in reverse so that the first car’s would be on top. Most of the time I could remember what boxes went to whom without the aid of bringing the cards out with me. Luckily, I only gave out wrong boxes due to this just a couple of times. It was quite an awful feeling to see the first car leave then look down and realize their box was still on your dolly which meant the next person’s box drove off in that car. One of those occasions the person realized the situation before getting too far down the road and was able to come back while the other person was still sitting there. Not too long after I moved on from carryout management made it a rule to only help one car at a time I’m sure due to this.

Helping a line of cars was never really an issue. The only time it was tricky was when there was other complicating factors in addition to simply carrying boxes for example: rain. There was a canopy at the door but it was barely big enough to cover one car at a time. There was only one time that I remember that I had to put on the hooded rain coat the company provided for us due to heavy rain. I remember it was actually a nice change of pace to the regular day because it was a nice rain coat. At the time I felt immune to the rain since the hood was deep enough to completely shield my face from the rain so I didn’t get the least bit wet. Another tricky part would be the few times the security card wouldn’t open the door. There was a small window you could look into to try to motion someone inside to open the door for you but the carryout area was sort of secluded at the end of the building so most of the time you just had to walk the short distance to the main door and back around. This always seemed to happen only when I had a long line and I remember feeling a bit embarrassed that I had walk around to get back inside. I forgot to mention that in between helping cars you would get the occasional call from either the front counter or the customer service people. They’d be looking for an order or a card usually. The other people that worked the door would ignore the phone but I never could for some reason. There’s nothing like being able to look out the window at a full line of cars and the phone ringing at the same time.

Whenever I talk to someone that has been in the company for as long as me or longer I always say that my first month end was the last month of the free “on the go” package. The “on the go” package was a basically a set with a tote bag and other random stuff geared to be taken with the consultant when she was out on the street doing her business. I believe it was a $20 add on normally. Due to this being the last month of getting it free with the starter kit it resulted in every car that night having at least one starter kit and most of the time more than one. There was even a couple of cars that had 10 or more starter kits. Back then we even had to check to see if they wanted the video or not. Near the end of the night we had someone who only helped us get starter kits. We’d come back from getting the cards and say to them something like “I need 3 English with 2 English videos and 2 Spanish with one Spanish video”. Needless to say I was completely worn out when we finally finished the line at somewhere around 9pm. We used to get so busy at month ends that the managers had us all park in the back parking lot instead of the lot right outside of carryout because they would need the extra room for all the consultants that would come. I could always count on at least one hour of overtime a month back then. Funny thing is that somewhere out there there’s a video and a few pictures of me loading starter kits into a new consultant’s trunk. I’ve always said to myself that that is some big time director now and I’m in her scrape book.

The main thing that kept me going everyday was the consultants. It got to where I could identify the regulars just by the car they drove and sometimes have their box ready before they got to the door. I had a regular consultant that every time she picked up an order she gave me a packet of powdered vitamin C that you would mix into water (I tried it once and it was nasty stuff but I still took the packets). She got to where I would hand her her order and she’d say “thank you and here’s your energy for the day”. We also had this director who always picked up her entire group’s orders which could mean ten to fifteen boxes to load up each time. I remember one time her and her husband brought the building lunch. I thought it was funny when after they were done and packed up what was left they still came by carryout and picked up a car load of orders. I even had to have them close the door and roll down the window to get the last box in.

After reading all of this it seems like I worked carryout for several years but in truth it was only 9 months. In that time I got in the best shape that I’d ever been in from lifting boxes and just constantly moving but I remember at the end I was so sick of the job that one night when I passed my boss at that time’s office, with a skid of orders in tow behind me and 2 more at the other end of the warehouse waiting for me, I asked if there were any openings in the company’s janitorial services. Rather than see me miserable she took me that night to the job openings board and helped me put in for the job I’m at now. Oddly enough I now enjoy it when they say that they need help in carryout. I can only guess that it is because it is easier nowadays and that in the back of my mind I know that I wouldn’t have to do this every day for eight hours a day. I’m sure that having these memories helps some too.

Where now?