Pink Packing Peanuts and Princess Oppression

I finally have a summer job. True, the summer was half over when I actually started working, but hey, six weeks' pay is better than none! The job is at a book warehouse in Denver, and sounded fairly pleasant when I applied for it- picking book orders, receiving shipments, making calls to publishers- a little monotonous, but with visible results, you know? I don't mind busywork, because you really feel like you've accomplished something when you can point to an actual physical pile of books you sorted or paperwork you processed.

WELL, I started this week, and let me tell you, the powers that be neglected to inform me, prior to employment, as to exactly how much heavy lifting and general manual labor was involved in that "receiving shipments" part of the job. Let me explain. We get anywhere from 35 to 90 boxes of books per day. The boxes range in weight from 20 pounds to 5268 pounds (newsflash: books are heavy). The Oh-so-solicitous UPS driver stacks the boxes at the back of the truck, where my co-workers and I are expected to pick them up and load them onto pallets that we ("we" in this case meaning someone else) will then drive over to the receiving area with a forklift. So, first we carry 90 really dirty boxes from the truck to the pallets, then, once the pallets are full and have been moved to receiving, we pick them all up again and sort them into piles by publisher onto the floor, after which, we, yes, pick them up a third time and put them on the receiving table to open and check them, after which we enter the receiving info into the computer and do the paperwork, and then finally pick up all the books again and load them onto the upstairs cart or the downstairs cart, from which we will eventually handle them one final time when we actually put the books on the warehouse shelves. Through all this, I get to sit for about five minutes in between each shipment I open to do the computer stuff and paperwork, and for about an hour in the morning while I'm making calls. The rest of the day is spent standing up and carrying really heavy things.

I know that job description was fascinating, but it was necessary that you understand the mundane quality of the work and the amount of physical exertion required. You probably already understand enough about me and my views on any kind of manual labor to know the frame of mind I am likely to be in after several hours on this job. You won't be suprised, then, to learn that, late Wednesday afternoon, after receiving 74 boxes from UPS, unpacking the ninth box of a big order, I was somewhat inclined to think boiling thoughts (third note: the warehouse is not air-conditioned) and mutter bitter regrets under my breath about my incompatibility with such menial tasks and the utter injustice of a princess being trapped in that working environment, even though I'd more or less come to terms with the implications of a princess doing hard labor, thanks in great part to my mother's pointing out that Cinderella, Snow White, and even Belle, to some extent, began their careers in overwhelmingly unglamorous settings and did large numbers of strenuous chores. Hope for eventual rescue aside, I was really on the verge of snapping towards the end of that particular order.

Different publishers ship different ways; some book are packed in boxes made specifically to fit those books, some are packed with crumpled paper, some wrapped in bubble wrap, etc. This particular publisher's packing material of choice was pink packing peanuts. My warehouse doesn't pack with peanuts because they're a total and complete pain in the butt, they static-cling to your fingers and the box, and they crumble and the crumbs stick to everything, and they fly everywhere at the slightest breeze. After scooping the pink packing peanuts out of nine boxes, I had two more to go and a trash can next to me full to the brim of packing peanuts. There's no good way to handle packing peanuts, you can only fit so many in your hands, and when you try to move them to the trash can, peanuts drop in a trail from the box to the trash can, and stick to your hands when you try to drop them in. You feel like you're trying to empty the ocean with a teacup when you're scooping out enough peanuts to uncover the books, and in the meantime, pink packing peanuts are fluttering everywhere and starting to blow out of the close-to-overflowing trash can. For about the last three or four boxes, I'd been thinking, "I am so sick of pink packing peanuts!" and making a mental note to use that as my response when people asked me how my job was going, or how my day had been. But as I scooped the peanuts out of that ninth box, thinking again how "sick of pink packing peanuts" I was, I suddenly stopped and thought about that. It wasn't actually true, come to realize. I'd been pulling brown paper out of brown boxes all day until that shipment, and the few packing peanuts I'd unpacked earlier in the week had been ugly white cyndrilical ones. These packing peanuts were shiny pink swirls that looked like old-fashioned hard candy, and were the only pretty things in the receiving station. Darn it, I liked the pink packing peanuts, why was I practicing griping about them in my head? Furthermore, they were LIGHT!!! They were made of STYROFOAM! For a girl who'd been lifting a lot of 40 lb boxes, lifting dozens of handfuls of pink air should have been a lovely change! And yet I'd been standing there rehearsing complaints about them for the last hour, fully intending to open a conversation with those complaints at some point during the day.

There's a reason "count your blessings" is a cliche, just as "find the silver lining," or, "look on the bright side" are. It's because there is, almost always, a different way to look at your circumstances, and it means the difference between smiling to yourself for the rest of the day as you shake your head at the totally unique, completely suprising ways God can speak to you, and spending the last two hours of your working day reinforcing to yourself what a crappy time you're having so that you can convince other people of the fact later. So, until I can trade in that dirty warehouse for the gleaming library in "Beauty and the Beast" and the prince that goes with it, I'm going to treasure the pink packing peanuts.