Puns in real life

So I've gotta write this one hastily, because I have a cigar to get back to. (Sorry.)

Anyway, I work with a bunch of Puerto Rican guys. They all have names like Simba, Isoel, etc., and sometimes their names (like "Simba") have cultural connotations that American white people would pick up on, although to the Puerto Ricans these names are completely normal. Keep that in mind.

So anyway, after filling out my forklift checklist this morning, I'm about to leave the office. Before I do, Kaylie (one of the office ladies) gives me a truck to load. "It's in Door 24, right next to the office."

So I go out there and open the dock door. When I do, I see the long, empty truck bed--and it has two FedEx packages at the end of it.

"Hmm," I say. "This isn't a FedEx truck. I wonder what this means."

So I go back into the office and ask if the packages are ours. Kaylie says, "Huh, I don't know. The FedEx guy just left, but that's weird that they'd be in the back of the truck. Let's go look at them."

So we do. Two packages--one big, one small. We go back into the office and ask around. Nobody is sure what to do with the packages.

Then Rob (the warehouse manager) comes down from upstairs and says: "Oh yeah, those are ours. Matt [the trucker, who knows us and the FedEx guy] picked 'em up from the FedEx guy and put 'em into his truck before he backed in. Yeah, those are ours. Go unload 'em. That big one is the new tech printer that we ordered."

So we go back to unload them from the truck. Kaylie grabs the small box, and I look at the printer box.

"Oh yeah," Kaylie says, "that's the printer box. Someone said that it's supposed to be heavy--like 60 pounds. Who has big muscles? Like, we need someone strong who can lift this one. Who has big muscles around here? ... Oh hey, Macho! Can you help us with this package?"

And there you go.

Forklift Reflections and a story

I thought of this blog's title while looking down from a forklift at a puddle.

I am a forklift driver at a warehouse which must, for the present, remain nameless.

I don't want to maintain this blog.

If I do maintain it, the one thing people have told me to include in it is "stories from my life."

For example.

In college I was an English major. One of the last novels I read before graduating was Moby-Dick. (Keep that in mind.)

After graduating, I got a job as a technical writer at a grain processing facility. One of the grains processed in this facility was quinoa. Quinoa, when milled, becomes a very fine flour—something like talcum powder. It has a creamy, off-white color.

One day a coworker asked me to obtain a sample of some quinoa flour. So, I dutifully went to the QA department and got the sample probe, which is a metal rod that pokes into bags of grain, opens up, and receives grain into its hollow center before it shuts again.

I went to the warehouse, opened a 5-foot-tall bag of quinoa, and started jabbing the sample probe into  it. I then began to have deja vu such that I remembered phrases like "From hell's heart I stab at thee--I spit my last breath at thee." I was somewhat confused by these thoughts until I noticed that the sample probe in my hands looked and felt like a harpoon, and the bag of quinoa in front of me looked a lot like the hump on a white sperm whale.

Moby-Dick, it turns out, is relevant to life.

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That is probably a fair example of what you'll find on this blog. Bear in mind, though, that it has been a couple years since I enjoyed writing, and that the other stories will (most of them) include human beings.