Megacards

How do you know you are getting old? When out-of-the-blue your brain suddenly speaks up and goes, hey dude do you remember that one time when…? That happened to me recently. My aging brain cells decided to do a data dump and I suddenly had a synaptic recall of an incident back in '87. That was back in the olden days. In 1987 I had recently returned from two years in Brazil. I was working for a living while trying to save for my next run at a college education.  In 1987, Erie PA just wasn't the place to find a good job. In 2010 it isn't a good place to find a job – period. But this is a rambling reminiscence, let's just stay in 1987.

A couple of the jobs I held were typical minimum wage jobs.  I was a bread-slicer.  Did you ever wonder how all those loaves of bread in the bags get so uniformly sliced? Nah, neither did I – knowledge isn't always comforting. I did that very late at night and very early into the morning at SuperDuper on W. 26^th St. I was an Arby's Roast Beef slicer. I did that late in the evening at the brand new restaurant at E. 38^th and Pine. The owner's wife would come in and go through the garbage to make sure we weren't wasting good product. Let me tell you, there are stories to tell. That's why I never ate there unless I prepared my own food. And I was a Laundry delivery driver. I did that early in the morning.

The laundry job wasn't so bad. I got to drive all over NorthWestern PA. The radio was my friend and the labor was light. I was lucky to have the position. I only had it because there was an emergency opening. The usual driver was named Tim. He was what you would call soberness-challenged. He got drunk one night and drove his car into another vehicle and lost his license for six months. I say he got drunk one night. But I am not sure he ever was completely sober. The company put him on one of the big washers and he spent his days dropping heavily loaded nets of laundry into the machines. He didn't like it. His eyes were always bloodshot red and he looked like he had fought all night with the demons from the pit.

One day a complaint came in that I had been rude to one of the clients at an Edinboro Country Club. Though I swore my innocence the boss fired me within 10 minutes of the phone call. He couldn't afford to lose clients. Tim had just gotten his license restored and he was only too happy to take his old job back. It didn't matter much. The laundry went under soon after. I found out later that it wasn't me the country club had a problem with – it was another driver. Laundry owner man had too much pride to call me back. That would mean he had to apologize. Besides, Tim had resumed control as his wheel man.

A few months later I was lucky to hear of a new place that needed people badly. It was a company called Megacards.  It was in an old warehouse near 26th and Cherry.  Trucks could barely back into the dock because there was no room to manuever.  In fact, drivers usually had to call the shop and get directions because they had driven back and forth on 26th street several times and still didn't have a clue where the place was.  I always thought it would be a great place to leave a body in one of those crime drama shows.  "Over here, Detective. The body was found by a homeless guy going through the dumpster beside this rundown old shop."  "Poor fellow.  The victim's decision to stop and take a pee in this part of town was the last bad decision he'll ever make."

All I did all day long for most of my sentence there was to stand at a big table and sort baseball and football cards.  When we got in a batch of hockey cards it was cause for celebration because there was at least some variety.  It was so mind-numbing that I remember the stockboys spending a full day arguing over the bra size of the girl who brought the insurance papers.  Which, come to think of it, is a full day's worth of discussion for 18-20 yr old guys.  The fact that these guys were in their 40s and 50s was disturbing to me.  Now I know that some guys are perpetually 18 years old when it comes to bra sizes. Even so, Megacards was a job you could only dread because the days were tedious and interminable. 

A bunch of my former co-workers from the laundry were already employed there, including the owner who fired me and Tim the tipsy wheelman. They worked the overnight shift.  They just stared at me through bleary eyes the first morning I walked in. They were all hunched over one of the big tables and sorting cards into piles. When enough of us had gathered to the side they just put their cards down and walked past us. We simply took up a spot and resumed the sorting. A 10 minute break in the morning, a half hour for lunch and another 10 minute break before quitting time. We were staggered for break times even though there was no moving machinery at the tables to keep running.  We were the machine. The production had to keep moving. I guess the boss never did figure out that the total man-hours were the same whether he staggered us or let us all break at once.  Maybe he thought that if there was no movement then he was losing money.  Or maybe he just tried to keep us from planning a jailhouse riot.  It could have been either. 

The boss was a tartar named Ed. He had been the mechanic at the laundry. Now he was the boss at the sportscard shop. He had managed to pocket enough laundry money to buy a piece of ownership in this new venture.  Ed was one of the meanest cusses I have ever met.  Even if he didn't growl at you for some imagined misstep, he would stare you down like he was the alpha lion in the pride.  If you didn't avert your eyes in deference fast enough he would find an excuse to yell at you.  His eyes were usually bloodshot red, too.  Many assumed it was from too many late nights at the bar. But I think it was because he didn't sleep much. Or maybe it is something that just happens to people who work for years at an industrial laundry.

Ed was always at work at 5 in the morning.  He left late too.  The job was his life, and pity the fool who didn't make it their primary priority as well.  Sports memorabilia was right next to cancer research and world peace in global importance. You can make a good living on any of them.  Except for the peons who worked the sorting tables.  One plus about the job was that you could earn a little extra scratch at Megacards.  We were allowed to work extra hours if we wanted; encouraged to, in fact.  But there was no overtime because we weren't required to work OT.  We got the regular wage whether it was a 40 hour week or an 80 hour week.  Another way to make extra dough was to sneak a high value card out of the shop.  Legend has it that Joe V. smuggled out a box of 100 Bo Jackson rookie series cards.  I have no idea if this is true or not.  How do you sell 100 of them?  I'm suspicious of the claim.  But knowing Joe, it could have happened.

One day I got the nod to work on the cutter.  The sportscard sheet-cutter sat in a prominent position in the shop.  It was front and center. All peasant activity was in the hinterlands that surrounded the cutter kingdom. We all passed around it daily like pilgrims circling the black stone on a Hajj.  Any annointed enough to be assigned work on the cutter was also called a cutter.  The cutter had a very precise job because the cards needed to be cut at exact specs as to edge and margin. The margins were measured to 1/100 of an inch. If you messed up a lot of money went down the drain.  A Bo Jackson rookie card could pull fifty bucks.  One bad cut through fifty stacked sheets could potentially cost the company several grand.  If you got a shot at being the cutter it meant that someone noticed your work was careful and errorless.  It was actually a more physically demanding job, but it had an air of trust in the assignment.  We were starved for recognition and thought the job of cutter to be a gift of selection from the gods.  The cutter was a potentially dangerous tool.  It sliced through stacks of sheets of cardboard like a hot knife through room temperature margarine.  Thinking back now, being promoted to cutter was probably like being the native girl chosen to be thrown into the volcano to appease the island deity.  It might hurt you, but there was honor in being chosen.  Not that Ed would try to hurt you by putting you on the cutter.  The cards were too precious to stain them with the blood of such common and jejune employees as us.  He could always find other ways to punish you. He could send you back to hours and hours of sorting cards.

The cutter took a little time to get used to, but we developed a rhythm.  Soon, my co-workers and I had it moving along pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.  As the day wore on, we ran out of boxes to place the cards.  Every card was sorted out by player and year and placed in boxes of 500.  Like Oliver Twist, I was the unlucky fellow chosen to go up front and ask Ed for some more.  It wasn't really as scary to me as the other guys thought it would be.  It wasn't our fault, I thought.   We simply needed more boxes. 

So I went up to Ed, and I looked him in the eye and said, "We need some more bosicks."  He looked at me like, "What the…?"  I tried again, "We need more bockes, bosix."  My tongue was completely tied.  I just couldn't say the word boxes.  I tried again, "I mean we're out of bosses."  At this point his glare turned to genuine concern.  I could see his mind starting to analyze the situation before him.  I had this flash of insight.  Ed thinks I have lost my ever-loving mind.  He's probably been dreading this moment for months.  He's waiting for me to pull a weapon and shoot him and half the joint up.  Two months of brainless rote and repetitive toil has turned me postal.  In frustration I pointed to a pile of packed boxes.  "We need more of those."  The recognition crept back into his eyes as he comprehended the jist of my petition.  His understanding returned.  So did the meanness.  "So why the hell didn't you say so?  What are you, some kind of moron?  There are more on the dock around the flats.  Go get 'em yourself."  And with that, he strutted back into his office and slammed the door.  His office was equipped with a private bathroom.  I can only hope that I scared him bad enough that just then he had to use it. 

And thus I temporarily became the company idiot.  The next day I was back at the sorting tables shuffling cards.  But the look on Ed's face was worth it.