No one called me cart boy to my face but they probably did behind my back. That was the crux of my job, pushing reports on a Rubbermaid cart, dropping them off for each CSR. The reports were DOS-matrix style, the CSRs customer service reps for the big aerospace chemicals company. The reports were orders for the CSRs to input to the warehouse. The products things like atmospheric gases, nitrogen, argon. Looking back you could see how information didn’t exactly flow between different functions in a large organization before there was cloud-based technology. Instead people moved it. On carts.

And here I’d been to college, lived on the west coast, worked for Starbucks headquarters, seemed like a smart guy, could type, and somehow I was pushing carts. But I was also saving money to move to France which no one knew. It was my hideous, beautiful secret, and deep down I despised them all: the sad people who would spend their lives at the aerospace chemicals company. I had no idea how I’d spend mine but it wouldn’t be pushing carts.

That was springtime 1998. I moved back home to the east coast with my two cats and tried to make some money temping before my one-way trip to France. I think in two months I made just over a thousand dollars.

Temps weren’t allowed to park anywhere near the main entrance to the offices; we parked far away. And the complex was large and boastful spanning acres of flat former farmlands. Oil paintings of the previous board members in the lobby. You temped for maybe a month before anyone practiced getting to know your name. Temps were lower than the lowliest full-time employees and it was the lowliest full-time employees who’d always remind you of that. Often when you were delivering reports or separating the mail. You could tell by the way they looked at you with an almost guilt, dismissive.

The mail came in a big plastic bucket before lunch and because I didn’t have much else to do I began looking forward to it. The stupid names, the looks on their stupid faces when they came to see what they got. Ed Martinez. Leanne Miller. Pennsylvania Dutch names like Snyder. They became something more to me I was so bored, picturing them home after work with their shoes off and their feet up. I sat at the desk of a receptionist who was out on leave and glared across the office at them, fixed to their screens chewing bubble gum.

I even made friends with a guy in the warehouse who had a mustache and a canoe and as it turned out some weed that afternoon we met by the bridge and paddled down the muddy Lehigh River. They drug tested but he knew the pattern of when. That would be a precondition if I were to apply (they all thought I should quit temping and hire on full time). I wanted badly to spill the beans about my plans to move to Europe but promised myself I wouldn’t. It would be more fun, a grand exit of sorts, to one day just disappear. Then what would they say about the temp.

And so on the first day of May I left JFK for Barcelona and did a little salute from my oval window looking down over the ground, laughing, wondering who they’d get to push the cart now. Unlike them I was going places. But after France I couldn’t say where.

Categories: Corporate America, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, Memoir, Nostalgia