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This whole piece of writing is because of a song by the Police that I haven’t heard in years but was running through my mind this morning. The song’s name is “Rehumanize Yourself” and it’s from their 1981 album “Ghost in the Machine.” I listened to that album a lot back in the 1980s and I’ll have to give it another listen soon. But meanwhile it reminded me of my summer job back in the summers of 1987 and 1988.
The summer of 1987 was the first time I worked at a place called Prentice Hall. It was a book distribution warehouse (a publisher too) and my uncle happened to work there at the time. I was looking for a summer job since I was home from college and he knew that they hired college students for the summer. So I got a job there.
One of the main types of books that Prentice Hall distributed were textbooks to schools. So the summer was their busy time as they had extra books coming through the place as schools all over the country got ready for the upcoming school year that started at the end of the summer. I, and a lot of the other college kids, worked in the Quality Control department.
The first summer I worked there I was on the loading dock. The way the place worked was:
1) An order was placed.
2) The order came to the guys who drove electric vehicles all around the warehouse.
3) They picked all the books off of shelves and put them on the carts they dragged behind them.
4) The carts were dropped off at quality control.
5) The quality control people checked each order to make sure the right books were there.
6) The book carts were pushed over to the packing department.
7) The packers packed them in boxes.
8) The boxes went onto skids (wooden pallets piled high with boxes).
9) The skids went onto trucks.
My job that summer was to make sure the right skids (pallets full of books in boxes) got on the right trucks. Each box had a bill of lading attached to it with the name of the shipping company on it. At least half a dozen shipping companies were used to ship the books. If the box of books said “Yellow Freight” on it I made sure it was on a Yellow Freight skid and the skid got onto a Yellow Freight truck.
If a box that said it was for ABS Trucking (Always Be First!) was on a Yellow Freight skid then it was my job to move it onto the Yellow Freight skid.
Every now and then I was to open a box, make sure the right books were in the box, and tape the box back up.
When a truck pulled in to load up there was a guy whose job it was to run the forklift and load the skids on to the truck. He would stop before he put the skid on the truck and I would check the bills of lading a second time to make sure the right stuff was going on the right truck. It wasn’t a tough job but you had to pay attention. It was a bit dull but it was always fun talking to the drivers. So when they’d pull in it was an event. It beat looking through boxes.
In the summer of 1988 I had a different quality control job. It turned out I had done the job too well last summer. I didn’t make a single mistake and that showed up some of the other full time people. It turned out the loading dock job was a little more coveted by the regulars because it was slightly less dull than some of the other jobs and they didn’t want me, or any other college kids, working there anymore.
So that summer I worked on the carts with a bunch of about four other college students. Our job was to make sure that the pickers picked the right books. After they made the rounds of the warehouse they’d drop the carts off with us and we’d check each order for the right books. If they missed something they’d go back and get it. After we checked everything we’d roll the cart over to the packers’ area.
We got each other to talk to on occasion but the job was duller than being on the loading dock. There was a lot of standing around broken up by ISBN checks. It wasn’t enough to check the titles of books, since they could be similar, so we had to make sure the ISBN number on the bill matched the one on the book. “ISBN check!” was the phrase that went through my head all summer.
This was before the age of social media. You can now keep track of just about anyone you meet. But back then if you left a place you mostly left everyone you knew there forever. Here are a few of the people I remember from that summer. I mostly remember the characters the best.
My Boss – I can’t remember his name but he ran our Quality Control department. I remember him having big glasses but he was fairly nondescript. He was a nice guy who looked out for us. He was maybe in his early thirties. If you were casting a middle manager in a movie he would look like this guy. He would fit right into “Office Space.”
Craig – An enthusiastic guy who was looked at as a bit of a weirdo in the place. Weirdos are my people so I got along with him fine. He ran the forklift at the loading dock so I worked with him a lot that first summer. He must have been in his late 20s. I’m not really sure. He had a love for machinery and especially big diggers. In his spare time he used to go to job sites, watch the diggers, and even photograph them. It was his dream to learn how the run them and get a job using them. He even commissioned a drawing from me of one of the digging machines. I wonder if he ever got to dig with one?
Beef – He was a big and heavy guy so I think that’s how he got his nickname. I didn’t work with him as much but he ran a forklift too. He had some charisma to him and was popular around the place. I think he also played on the softball team. If memory serves that was something that brought a lot of the regulars together. Playing softball.
ABF Driver – I can’t remember his name but in my memory he looks sort of like Gabe Kaplan from “Welcome Back Kotter” except more normal looking. I think he had short brown (maybe curly) hair and a dark mustache. He must have come in every day or two (around 4PM) and he was good to talk to. We always had good conversations to pass the time as the truck was being be loaded. The only thing I distinctly remember him saying was to complain that Yellow Freight was expanding and taking everybody’s work. There sure were a lot of Yellow freight trucks coming through the place.
Fun Guy – I wish I remembered his name as he was the star of the place. He was a regular who worked in Quality Control with us. He was around my age at the time (I turned 21 in the summer of 1987 and 22 in 1988). Maybe a year or two older. He hadn’t gone to college and this was his daily job. He was good looking, good with the ladies, personable, and liked to go out and have fun. Everybody liked him and liked to live vicariously through him. Especially the older “Normal” regulars. He always had a story for you. He wasn’t the best worker but everybody covered for him. The regulars would hate it if he got fired because he was the life of the place. I always got the impression that he wanted to eventually leave and find his place in the world. I wonder if he ever did?
Young Mother – I think she was younger than me and might have only been nineteen at the time. She was a regular in the Quality control department who I worked with that second summer. Her story was that she had a baby at about sixteen and now she was out in the world working to support her child. I don’t think a father was in the picture. Her parents may have even disowned her (I can’t quite remember). She was as sweet as the day was long and everybody in the place looked out for her.
Older Woman – I had forgotten about her until I was proofreading this. I’m not sure how old she was but I would guess she was at least in her 50s. People were in worse shape, in general, in the 1980s then now so she could have been younger. I was only 21-22 then so my judgment and memory could be off but she did have to sit down and work. I remember her being nice and she liked to chat. The one quote I remember her saying was about saving money. “The first ten thousand is the hardest,” she said one day. I don’t know how much she and her husband had saved up but it must have been a good amount.
College Kid – This is where the Police Song “Rehumanize Yourself” finally fits in. I wish I could remember college kid’s name but I don’t. I don’t even remember what school he went to except it was just a regular school for a regular major. Not an art school like me. But he was the one I hung out with on the job most that summer.
This was one of those jobs where you had to “Look busy” even when you weren’t. If you couldn’t look busy then you’d hide. So we hid among the boxes of books. One day few of us were sitting there chatting and somehow I talked about that Police song and specifically mentioned the lyric, ‘Because violence here is a social norm.” College kid liked that lyric and was also in the habit of occasionally doodling on the boxes as we sat. So he wrote that line on a random box.
It all should have ended there and I never would have a Prentice Hall association with the song except a couple of hours later our boss came over all in a tizzy. It seems that someone had seen that written on the box and reported it to someone else. It went up the chain and people got upset. We couldn’t have anyone getting these textbooks thinking Prentice Hall was a place where violence was a social norm.
They asked who did it and we all pleaded ignorance. I remember saying, “I think that’s just a song lyric.” Since no one confessed the boss told us not to write on the boxes and went away. Now, thirty eight years later, that silly little story entered my mind today as that song ran through my head. Time is a funny thing.
Here is an article from 1965 about Prentice Hall expanding into West Nyack where I worked twenty two years later.
https://www.nytimes.com/1965/10/13/archives/expansion-is-set-by-prenticehall-publisher-plans-distribution.html