Sam's fingers

One quick story before bed.

One day I came in to work and found out Sam was going to be out for a week because he broke his fingers. How did he break his fingers, you ask?

Well, a customer came to pick up a dining table one day. Somebody else was in the loading dock of the store, so the customer had parked across the street. Now, the loading dock was about 4 feet above street level, and there were no stairs, so we would put any heavy boxes on the edge of the loading dock, hop down, then grab them again and put them in the cars. So on this day, Sam jumped down, got the box and carried it across the street. Kevin asked him if he needed any help, as it was a pretty heavy box, but Sam brusquely said, "No, I got it" (this was a huge catchphrase of his, as he didn't like to admit ever needing help, because of his special-neediness).

Halfway across the street, Sam dropped the box. The customer asked if maybe this table was broken after the fall, and even though Sam said it was fine, the customer looked at the dented in corner of the box and asked for another one. So Kevin jumps in to the action, goes to the stockroom to get another dining table box (the flat pack kind that you put together yourself if it's not obvious), and carries it across the street and puts it in the customer's car.

By this time, Sam is steamed. He's mad at himself for dropping the box, he's mad at Kevin for asking if he needed help, then coming to his rescue after he made a mess of things. So he carries the box back to the loading dock, hoists it up onto his shoulder, and when he shoves it on to the loading dock, it lands right on his hand and breaks four fingers.

This is typical.

So I called Kevin

So I called Kevin up today at work. I talk to him every month or two, just to catch up and usually make fun of Sam a little more. I told him that I gave them fake names to protect their identities. He told me I should have used Hector and Carlos for their names, but I told him that sounds kind of racist. He called me a bad name.

Kevin is about 25 years old. He's short, like I already said, and if you watch Entourage, he is very much like Turtle, only not so much in the white-boy rapper vein. He's got a baby face that the girls think is cute, and he pretty much always wears white t-shirts and jeans.

Sam is probably 38 or so by now. He definitely doesn't look this old. I always thought he was about 28 when we worked together. He liked to wear white t-shirts too, but with disastrous results. See, unloading trucks all day tends to get one dirty. Kevin knew how to keep the dirty boxes from rubbing up against his clothing, but Sam lacked dexterity and coordination, so after a long day his shirt would be turning gray, his hair would be disheveled and he's be pretty much a mess.

Doing trucks there was fun and painful. We unloaded boxes from the delivery truck, and formed a fire-line to the elevator. One guy would unload a box, pass it to the middleman, who would then pass it to the third guy, the elevator loader. Loading the elevator required some skill in organization, so it was always Kevin or myself that did this part of the job. Sam would often ask if he could load the elevator, but I would only let him do it if we had a very small truck that day.

In any case, whoever had to be the guy behind Sam always had it bad, because he had a bad habit of touching your balls nearly every time he handed you a box. Again, lack of coordination, and not gayness, is what caused this. You know how when you're folding sheets with someone and you don't know which way they're going to fold it, and you go back and forth in a little sheet-turning dance? This is what working with Sam was like. If you reached for a box one way, he was sure to hand it to you the other way. And for some reason the way he gave it to you was likely to have his hand touching up against your testicles.

We would usually finish doing the truck about 2 pm, and then it was lunchtime. Kevin and I would usually scrape a couple bucks together and buy a pizza, then we'd make Sam go pick it up a couple blocks away. As a reward for going to get it, he could have some of the pizza. This went on for about a year before he started to tire of it. I remember the day when we asked if he wanted to go pick up the pie, and he said, "Why do I always have to go get the pizza?". And Kevin told him, "Because we always pay for it". "Oh yeah", Sam said, and off he went.

The funny thing is, he probably had more money that we ever did. Because Sam was a gambling savant. I don't know how he did it, but he was always going to the casino or buying scratch tickets and winning big. This pissed Kevin off more than anything, because he always lost. Always. He showed me a big stack of losing scratch tickets he kept in his glove box. I asked why he kept them, and he said once a month in Boston they have a drawing where they pick one of these losers to win. You just had to fill out your information on the backside and turn it in and you were entered. He probably spent $300.00 a month on scratch tickets each month, and invariably Sam would walk in on a Monday morning and show us his scratch ticket that won him $500.00. Boy was Kevin steamed.

Sam and Kevin

When I lived in Boston once upon a time, I had two guys who worked for me in the stockroom. I'm going to call them Sam and Kevin, just because they're quite guilty and I probably should protect them from undue ridicule.

Sam was my big problem at work. He has a learning disability and he tends to take a long time to process information. In some cases he doesn't process it at all, in others you wonder exactly was processed, because it surely wasn't the information that was given him. Great guy though, heart of gold. He'd worked at that store for about 5 years at that point, first helping the designers move merchandise around, then later moving to the stockroom. He usually had a pretty one-track mind, but he was a real workhorse because of it, would just keep working and working and working (even if sometimes he was doing it completely wrong).

Kevin was a little Southie punk, except he didn't actually hail from south Boston, he was from Cambridge, living in the shadow of Harvard University. He could have easily been a stand-in for any of the friends of Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting, except he's kind of short so he would've looked pretty funny next to the others. He had a real thick Boston accent and always called me Mahk. He told me once he wondered why autistic children got a lot of attention just because they can draw nice. Maybe you're getting the picture of this guy just from that last statement.

Now these were my full time stock guys at this store. It was a little store, and while we could have definitely used a little more help in the stockroom, the three of us did a decent job of keeping things up, along with a couple of part-time night workers.

The whole purpose of this introduction is that I have some pretty good stories to tell about my time there, but I realize it's midnight and I have to get up early in the morning, so I'll stop there and resume tomorrow.