Rex

         It was sitting there twisted as a tree root.  The longer Rex stood on his ride looking at it the less he liked the picture; close to a thousand pounds of shampoo stuck on a pallet facing the wrong way, twenty five feet in the air.  Rex glanced down the aisle to where the clock was hanging from the ceiling—not much time before lunch, and he was already way behind on his pallet count.  Looking back up at the pallet he was supposed to pull down next Rex determined the only bright side to the situation was the pallet seemed stable enough, for all the motion—it wasn’t going to come crashing down until Rex went up there and bothered it.

         The storage racks at La Femme’s warehouse were fairly standard.  The bays—bays being where pallets were actually stored, like a shelf in a kitchen—were about 8 feet long. That’s enough space to fit two pallets in side by side with a little bit of room for error.  They were 4 feet deep, so the pallets would fit in nice and snug.  Each bay was 4 feet tall, 4.5 if you counted the bottom and top beams the pallets rested on.  These bays were organized by aisles, maybe twenty five bays long with bays on each side of the aisle.  There were six levels of bays rising to the ceiling, and as Rex did the math he figured the problem pallet was resting on a beam 27 feet in the air, with the top boxes on that pallet coming in at over 30.

         Resisting the urge to skip this particular task, Rex began analyzing the situation.  The pallet—near as he could see, considering the height and angle—had been put back up twisted the last time someone pulled it down.  The pallet was now partially being one of the upright beams.  That meant the usual technique of drive straight in, grab the pallet, and bring it down wasn’t a viable option.  He’d have to drive in at an angle, and hope the pallet wasn’t so twisted the forks could just slide all the way in.  Once he managed to get his forks into the pallet, he’d have to twist the pallet to face front again.

         Rex hopped off his ride, a “reach” truck.  It was a sizable machine, with a compact design.  To save space there was no seat, and the operator had to stand.  Instead of a steering wheel, it has a crank-type wheel that controlled direction, and a joystick that controlled speed and fork movement.  The forks rode a mast that rose above the operator’s compartment, and telescoped out a lot like a fire truck ladder, extending increasingly smaller pieces of steel until reaching max height.  It was called a reach truck because the forks could extend about 5 feet out—letting Rex “reach” out and grab pallets even if he couldn’t drive right up against them.

         The problem at hand was the steel uprights supporting the bays.  Rex needed to—ideally—go right through the upright in order to grab this pallet.  Seeing as this wasn’t exactly in the cards given the laws of physics, Rex started to debate the feasibility of straightening out the pallet so it could be picked up as usual.  The problem with that was Rex couldn’t see the back of the pallet—for all he knew, there could be fallen boxes from the next aisle over blocking the space behind.  The only way to make this day any less productive was to make a few cases of shampoo explode thirty feet in the air.

         Out of nowhere a mess of forklift horns started blasting, as the rest of Rex’s team emerged from aisles and workzones all over the warehouse on their way to the break room.  Rex glared at the couple guys riding past his aisle, irritated at the jarring crash of his train of thought.  As suddenly as the cacophony started, it stopped.  Rex sighed into the fresh silence.

         Rex had dark hair, dark eyes.  He didn’t smile very often, and most people found it hard to tell the difference between Rex thinking and Rex angry.  A quiet man, Rex didn’t quite fit with the rest of his team—they were loud, boastful, and opinionated. They spent their time bitching equally about their women, their jobs, and their football teams.  Rex rarely saw the point in complaining about a fucked-up situation.  If it could be fixed, you only wasted time complaining.  If it couldn’t be fixed, you were just amping up your blood pressure for nothing. 

Rex wasn’t a small man, even if he was getting a little soft around the middle, and he regularly spent eight hour shifts hauling fifty pound cartons of clothing around without complaint.  This bought him enough respect that no one gave him too much shit—but when push came to shove, no one who saw showed any concerned at Rex fighting with a pallet instead of heading to lunch.  Most days this suited Rex just fine.

         Another glance down at the clock, a sixth look at his RF gun to make sure this really was the pallet he needed.  Rex spun the steering crank, and pulled the throttle to reposition his ride at the correct angle to drive into the pallet—as correct as possible given the interference from the upright beam, anyway.  Rex pulled up on the control stick, watching the forks rise to be sure they didn’t catch on anything on the way up.  There would be enough problems with catching things once he got the forks up to his target.

         Sure enough, as Rex reached into the pallet the forks hit the center stringer, pushing the pallet backwards an inch or so.  Chewing on the inside of his cheek, Rex worked his steering crank and throttle, trying to finagle the extra couple inches of clearance he’d need.  It didn’t take much more than grade school geometry to realize it just wasn’t going to happen.  Pausing a moment, drumming his fingers on the control stick, Rex weighed his options.  Experimentally he lifted the pallet—Rex could see the front of it move, but not nearly enough to lift the whole thing.

         But maybe, just maybe, it was enough to push the pallet back to facing front.

         Actually looking down to make sure the steering-indicator showed the machine was going to drive forward, Rex gently pushed the throttle stick forward. When the pallet didn’t move, he pushed a little harder and was rewarded by a jerk from the ride as the pallet shifted the crucial few inches to the left.  For a moment or two, Rex didn’t move.  He stood there, waiting to hear or see something that signaled new trouble with this pallet.  Rex pulled the forks out, straining his ears over the whine of hydraulics to hear the sound of breaking pallet falling boxes.

Rex repositioned his ride squarely in front of the pallet without lowering his forks, moving as fast as he dared while the ride’s center of gravity was about 15 feet in the air.  A final quick glance at the clock at the end of the aisle, lunch only about half over.  Rex was even further behind than he was fifteen minutes ago, and Rex knew you didn’t make up time by following every little rule the safety coordinator came up with.