Cool Story Bro

The summer after my first year in college I worked in a wood pallet factory. The shittiest job in town a town filled with shitty jobs. Wood pallets are one of those things that you never really think that someone actually spends their day making. The staff was half dudes out on work release from the county jail and half no hopers who clearly understood their fate and had given up trying to improve their life years ago.

My shift started at 6:30 and ended at 3:30. The air quality was terrible, you had to wear a mask and were constantly pulling gigantic black boogers out of your nose. Half of my coworkers had Tasmanian devil tattoos and the other half had Confederate flags. One guy had a Tasmanian devil waving a Confederate flag standing on top of a stock car.

In the bathrooms, instead of the usual grafitti like "for a good hot time call Cheryl" there was car grafitti. One dude wrote F.O.R.D., Fucked Over Rcycle Dodges written out with the first letter of the word. That was then crossed out and someone wrote "Mopar or No Car," which was then in turn crossed out with a bunch of key slashes to allow only "Chevy Thunder" to remain.

A lady had her hands chopped off a few weeks before I started. She was working on a table saw with another person and that person dropped the press while her hands were under it and the saw zipped through both of her hands. She was now promoted to the office and had three working fingers on one and two on the other hand. The blood stains on the floor under the machine were still visible most of the summer.

The guy I shared a machine with was a deaf and mostly toothless dude named Dale. Dale was totally allright. I lucked out with him. Everyday after shift end he'd run to his truck, shotgun two beers, throw them out the window and peel the fuck out of there.