It was moved there at the behest of a director towards the end of last year, and I was never happy with the idea. For one, there's no natural light (I always half-joke that it's a fucking prison) and secondly the noise from the forklift trucks is loud enough to hear even from two flights of steps above.
The worst thing, though, is that the warehouse is so vast that I can easily get lost in there for a good half-hour or so, making me embarrassingly late for the start of my shift, or delayed coming back from lunch. Earlier, I couldn't find my way out when I was trying to leave for the night, with the net result that I arrived home even more frustrated with myself than normal.
I've tried to do two things: I told my manager I have an appalling sense of direction, and am thus certain to get swallowed up from time to time, so please don't be too hard on me when I roll in miles past my allotted start time, humiliated. It occurred to me that if I had some obvious impediment, the company would have no choice but to exercise some patience with me - but I do not and thus my manager has seen fit to ignore me.
Secondly, I've tried to find 'markers' in the warehouse to give me a rough idea of where I am going. One vast bank of plasma-screen televisions here looks the same as these adjacent ones, though, and so I have given up the ghost on that. I am no further forward.
My manager can't believe I would struggle to get from one place to another inside the warehouse because I am otherwise capable of doing everything asked of me (and more) but it is true. In other words, people don't accept that I find it hard to do things which other people take for granted, but this instance is one of many that I can recall throughout my life:
- at the age of five, I could read books written for 11-year-olds, but could neither tie my shoelaces nor dress myself.
- at 13, I could speak fluent French but was unable to put on my school tie even when standing in front of a mirror.
- at 14, I was sent to the remedial class because I was incapable of drawing a circle with a compass.
- at 30, I didn't know what to do with a piece of luggage on a flight, despite the fact that I was standing in front of an overhead luggage rack, watching other people load their belongings onto it. I stood there, frozen, for what seemed like forever, and can still remember Bluefish's anger and disappointment that I couldn't carry out such a straightforward job.
I am capable but useless; clever but interminably stupid; talented but beyond help. The warehouse is none other than the continuation of a thread which refuses to be broken. This is more uncharted territory, in the ossuary of my own behaviour.
