A lot of people say that the best years of their life were their high school years or their college years. You never hear people say that their best times were had at a dead-end job that they hated waking up to every morning. Until now.
Working in a corporate hell-hole has made me realize several things, one of which was how much I appreciate my summer of 2004 at Challenge Printing, particularly the portion of that summer I spent at the Shakopee warehouse. I've never had so much fun working anywhere with anyone, and I miss it terribly.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Shakopee job that summer, we were packing PetSmart posters in giant boxes. We'd put them in folders by twos or threes, label those folders with the correct sticker, then move on to the next set until the box was full of about 60 posters.
Here are some of my favorite moments.
There was the time before Christine got there when I was doing a box with Chad at the end of the day on Friday, and we were going as slow as possible. I was loading the posters, and when I got to Dog 6, I labeled it in the Dog 1 spot. Chad looked at me and said, "This is not Dog 1." I laughed for about fifteen minutes non-stop. I couldn't even work at first; I just fell on the floor.
Wade, Chad's brother, worked with us for about three weeks. Before he quit (and still after), Chad would yell "OOOWEEEOOOO" really loud and in a really high voice for no reason. It echoed beautifully. He would also yell "FISHY FISHY FISHY" in the same loud, high-pitched voice whenever we got to the fish ones. This was one of the main reasons Wade quit.
On our last day there, we built a giant pyramid out of a bunch of cardboard triangles. I think we made a lot of noise while we were doing it, too.
The day we decided to do boxes as fast as we could and we started racing. I think the record was something like just under 20 minutes (when previously it would take an hour). Then there were several days when we would go as slow as possible. We would stop and just sit at Dog 3 for like 20 minutes. I think Dan and Chad took three hours on one once.
The games we would play with the stickers. It started with Chad. He would hide them or unravel them a lot, and it bothered me at first, but when it became a war, it also became hilarious. I'd like to think that we descended to throwing stuff at each other, and I'm pretty sure we did.
Why aren't there more jobs like this?
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