And now here I was seeing all that disrespect, all that stuff that had to be sorted through and thrown out. There were loads of it, mounds of it, truck after truck of it; it never seemed to stop, as if there was a machine somewhere in that enormous building that was pumping it out faster than I could carry it off. It was shit work, but what was I going to do about it? I kept my mouth shut and did what they told me, hour after hour, and tried not to think about anything else except what was in front of me. I wore a dumb orange helmet and orange vest for safety, and drove around on my own forklift and something they called a burden carrier, which could not have been more on the nose. I would drive around on my burden carrier and imagine that I was Butch Cassidy in Bolivia, trying to go straight. I tried to imagine bandits hiding in the packed shelves, but it only depressed me to know that no one was waiting. In fact, hardly anyone was in the warehouse at all. There were rows and rows of crap, miles and miles of boxes and bins, crates and containers, stacks and stacks of it moving around on its own, controlled by algorithms and automation. There were robotic arms waiting at stations, and the stacks would make their way to them. Every now and then I’d pass by the sorting station, where they opened the boxes and separated out the reusable stuff from the garbage. It was depressing seeing the other people, expressionless as they tried to move as fast as possible, trying to keep up with the machines, working for the robots it seemed.

“They haven’t invented anything that can work as well as the human hand,” Casey said. “When they do that, it’s game over for all of us.” Casey used her hands to save babies; I used mine to pick up trash.