10 Years

I suppose every blogger must decide what to conceal and what to reveal about work. Even if you’re self-employed, there is still a curtain drawn to obscure some of the nuts and bolts of one’s work.

With that aside, I will tell you that today marks the tenth anniversary of my current job. I work as an inventory control clerk for a major Midwestern grocery distributor. I am counting my year and a fortnight as a temp in the 10-year figure. Jobs were already scarce in those months leading to the Great Recession, and I also had a long gap in employment because I’d been home raising my daughter. In the summer of 2008, there were few listings in the local newspaper want ads, and almost all of them were for truck drivers or registered nurses.

Having neither an R.N. license nor a CDL, I turned to a temp agency for work. I scored well in the agency’s office skills test, but I still had to wait several months for my first work assignment. I remember getting that call when the agency asked me if I could start some data entry work at a particular location on the following Sunday at noon. The agency just told me that I’d need to wear sturdy shoes with non-slip soles because I’d be walking through a warehouse to get to my office. They did not let me know that I’d be entering data that I would be collecting myself or that said data collection would require walking through a half-million square foot facility, a minor part of which was an ice cream freezer kept at minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit (cold weather gear provided, thank goodness).

The term “data entry” really does not do justice to the work of inventory control. That’s like suggesting that solving an equation is nothing more than the writing of numbers, letters, and symbols. Inventory variances need to be explained. Cases don’t just sprout legs and walk away. They don’t clone themselves, either. Time and time again, I have seen the following principle played out in ways I could not have imagined if I didn’t do the work I do: outside of divine intervention, matter is neither created nor destroyed. The sum of inventory variances will approach zero with enough time and research.

Ten years later, I no longer spend part of my shift in the freezer, but I’m still sustained by the daily mystery of the missing and the found. I’m grateful that the temp agency didn’t tell me I’d be walking for miles. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be equal to the tasks that awaited me.

I tell my daughter that it’s almost never impossible that the best part of your life is still ahead of you. When I got that phone call to start a data entry job in a grocery warehouse, I had yet to own my own car. I hadn’t bought my first cell phone. Here we are 10 years later, living a life paid for with numbers, and I’m so grateful that I said yes to that call and even more grateful that the company took a chance on letting me work for them.