I had to drive thirty-plus minutes outside of town to get to the bland beige building that took up plenty of acres that could have been put to better use. It took me almost as long to find out where I needed to go as it did to drive there. I went from one person to the next, sitting in one chair or another while they went off and shuffled this paper or that. I sat there and hoped I wouldn’t be do any of that. No paper pushing for me. I shouldn’t have hoped. It was worse. I wasn’t pushing paper in the office; I was pushing the paper the office threw out. I was a garbage man. For the whole warehouse. I collected all the trash that the maintenance crews collected and hauled it to a central location. It wasn’t just the trash from the office, it was also trash from the warehouse. It wasn’t a warehouse that stored things to be shipped out; it was a warehouse where they stored the shit people sent back. Boxes and boxes, by the truckloads, came in all day all the time. People sent back perfectly good things, but also broken things, damaged things, stuff that looked twenty years old, and all kinds of crap, books, games, clothes, appliances, food, plants, you name it, somebody had bought it then turned around and sent it back. People also sent back other stuff, dead things, dead animals, rotten vegetables, boxes of shit, literal shit. Some guy sent back boxes of dirt, at least fifty boxes of dirt. They sent back things that had oil, or worse, poured on them. “Most people don’t respect property,” Frank had said more than once. “Thieves respect property,” I joked. “Maybe more than anyone else. They respect it so much that they want it for themselves so they can better, perfectly respect it.”

“But we don’t keep it,” Frank said.

“I guess we respect it so much, we want someone else to appreciate it as much as we do.”