Twelve Cuts

They didn't say fired. Nobody at the warehouse says fired anymore. The email said the site would “make twelve cuts before the end of the year,” and the list would go up on the Friday before Christmas.

I've experienced this once before, in Lagos, when I was twenty-two and the company I worked for stopped paying anybody in March. So I knew the feeling in my stomach when I read it. What I didn't know, that first week, was how loud a warehouse gets when nobody is talking. Two hundred people, all working faster, all saying nothing.

I decided I'd make myself difficult to cut. That was my plan, and I'm not proud of it. I took the double shifts. I learned the new scanner system in one evening, on YouTube, at my kitchen table in Joliet, and by Wednesday I was showing other people how to clear the error code that stops the belt. I got my numbers up. I stopped taking my full break.

The man who trained me didn't do any of that. Six years ago, on my first day, he showed me how to lift a box without ruining my back. He worked the way he'd always worked, which was well, and slowly, and he went home at six because he had three kids and a wife on nights.

The list went up at two o'clock on the Friday. Twelve names. Mine wasn't on it. His was.

I thought the list would be determined by who worked hardest. It wasn't. It was determined by pay. He'd been there nineteen years, and nineteen years of small raises makes an expensive man. My six years are cheap. That was the whole difficulty, and no amount of double shifts was ever going to touch it.

He shook my hand. That's the part I keep going over. He shook my hand at the end of the shift and said, “Good. You've got the young back for it.”

Now I work his station, at the end of aisle twelve. He used to keep a photo of his kids taped inside the shelf frame, where you can only see it if you're standing exactly where he stood. He took the photo with him. He left the tape.

I could pull it off in a second. I've been at that station three weeks now. I haven't.