Moving Things from One Place to Another Place

Imagine, for a moment, that you're a sweater.  A brand new sweater, just off the factory floor in, let's say, Malaysia.  You've got a long trip ahead of you.

The first thing that happens is: you're placed in a box with a bunch of other sweaters.  That box becomes part of a stack of similar boxes.  You are then (probably) staged in a secondary spot and loaded onto a truck; then staged again; then loaded onto a ship; then moved off the ship; then moved again; then put on a train; then taken off the train and onto another truck; then into a warehouse; then onto yet another truck.  Possibly to a second warehouse.  Another truck, and finally into a store.  You spend a few days “in the back” before someone carries you out and places you on a shelf.

All those movements.  All those vehicles.  All those people whose only job was, literally, to move you from one place to another place, and nobody’s even tried you on yet!

Look around the room you’re in.  Everything in it – everything – went through a very similar chain of events before you put it where it is now.

I drive a forklift for a living these days, which means my livelihood comes entirely from this act: the act of moving things from one place to another place.

Not doing anything with those things.  That’s not my job.  Not making, or changing, or fixing, or even looking at them.  Just moving them.  I pick a thing up in one spot, I put it down in another spot.  Sometimes I’ll move it a second time, and sometimes even a third.  Other times, it’s someone else’s job to move it that second/third/fourth time. 

Eventually, those things get to a spot where somebody does something with them.  Examines them, replaces them, communicates with the person who sent them.  But not me.  I only move them.

Okay, that’s not true.  I do that other part, too.  Roughly half of my worktime, I’m one of the people in the immediately preceding paragraph.  I examine, replace, communicate, bag, and then place those things on a conveyor belt so other people can do other things to them.  

After those people are done, I can only guess. I think fairies and ley lines become involved at that point.

That part of my job – the non-forklift part – has its bright points.  It’s the kind of job where you can listen to music of an audio book while you’re working, and there’s just enough variety to keep it interesting.  

But the forklift part of my job is way better.  It’s a little bit physical – I’m moving around all the time – it requires some initiative, and I get to drive a forklift.  Two kinds of forklifts, in fact.  It can get a little nervous, because there’s a lot going on around me.  A lot of people, a lot of stuff, and one very inconveniently placed steel beam.  

It was scuffed like that when I got here, I swear.

I'd only been forklifting for a week when I realized: my job is - literally - moving things from one place to another.  That’s it.  That’s the entirety of this job.  One hundred percent.

That’s what I get paid for.

A truck backs into a bay.  I take a forklift and move stacks of enormous boxes off the truck.  I stack them in another place.  Then, later, I unstack them and move them to a third, nearby place.  Still later, I use a hand truck to move them onto a machine that dumps their contents onto a conveyor belt.  The other half of my job is at the other end of that conveyor belt, but we’re not talking about that right now.

Other times, I only move the stuff off the truck once.  Someone else then moves it, usually onto another truck, where yet another person will move that stuff to yet another place.

And other times, somebody else moves the stuff off the truck and I’m the one who moves it the second time, usually to a freight elevator where – c’mon, take a guess – yet another person moves it onto the elevator and then to someplace else.

And that’s just what happens inside our building.  Think about how many times those things were moved before they got to us.  How many people moved each box!  Imagine, for a moment, just how vast the “moving things from one place to another place” industry must be.  I mean, these boxes didn’t just appear at my worksite.  A truck driver brought them there.  They didn’t just appear on the truck, either.  Somebody moved them onto that truck.  Somebody moved them to the spot where that guy could move them onto the truck.

Naturally, this brings me to teleportation.  Once we invent that, most of this will go away, right?  Well, maybe.  Maybe someday, a sweater removed from an upscale boutique shelf will be instantly replaced with another sweater, zapped directly from another shelf in Malaysia (or, more likely, the Gale Crater on Mars) to which it was zapped moments after being created.

Of course, by that time, we’ll have been largely replaced by our technological and mechanical overlords and, to the extent that things like sweaters and upscale boutiques exist at all, it will only be to help keep us occupied and out of our betters’ way.

Until then, we’ll have to settle for being dominated by the people who move things from one place to another.  Yes, fine, I see you, people who fix the things we use to move things.  I know, we couldn’t do our jobs without you.

But where did your tools come from, huh?