Hattie for Hire

Recently I have taken over a job for my sister of creating the window displays for the small kiosks around an outdoor shopping center once a month. I am not employed by the mall but rather work as an Independent Contractor. The title “Independent Contractor” seems very professional and entrepreneurial to me. Seeing as how today I completed the displays for January in 8-degree weather, I had originally intended to write about my perils of pinning and hanging with frozen fingers. However I find myself reminiscing instead on memories of my only other experience as an independent contractor.

One summer during high school my best friend Jill and I were hired to help fill orders for a uniform company. Memories of the first week are blurry to me because we spent our first few days working in the un-air-conditioned warehouse. I now understand why city riots always occur during summertime because after 8 hours of working in the stifling heat the typical bickering between Jill and myself quickly escalated to fisticuffs. I remember clawing at her helplessly with my back pinned against the concrete. Jill was and always will be much, much stronger than me. Therefore any effort at really fighting back was quickly met with an even stronger retaliation. I found it best to alternate between scratching and biting or to wait out the remainder of her aggression in the fetal position. After the forklift driver caught us mid brawl, we were moved inside near the air-conditioned offices.

The job consisted of the same tasks each day: review the stack of order forms, pull the appropriate (postal in our case) uniform pieces from the supply shelves, and send the sealed boxes to the shipping department. Jill and I were determined to make our process more and more efficient each day by trying out different assembly line techniques and patterns. The most time consuming portion of our work was assembling the mailing boxes. Our obsession with making this particular aspect of our assembly line more efficient is what spurred the naming of our summer job as “The Box Factory”. We were constantly experimenting in efficiency: was it faster to make a box then fill the order, or make 20 boxes at once and then fill multiple orders, or even better…devote an entire day to making boxes as preparation for the rest of the week? One day we opted for the third technique and made hundreds of boxes at once. “What is one to do with hundreds of mailing boxes,” you might ask. Well make a fort of course! Jill had the brilliant idea to stack the boxes floor to ceiling leaving the middle hollow. Inside our fort we ate our lunch and took naps during our two 15 minute breaks. (I think Jill still has the photographic evidence of this glorious feat.)

Towards the end of our stint at the box factory, our boss, a friend’s dad, asked us to start reporting how many orders we completed each day. He said he suspected the guys in shipping were slacking off and he wanted to compare their outgoing packages to our numbers. We couldn’t believe the irresponsibility of the shipping crew and diligently began tallying our orders. Maybe shipping wasn’t slacking off but rather we had become such masters of efficiency that they simply couldn’t keep up with our productivity.

After that summer, our friend, whose dad had hired us as independent contractors, let us know that her dad had us report to him because he believed us to be the ones negligent in our work. What fools we were! Masters of efficiency he thought us not.
He must have discovered the fort. In our defense hundreds of empty boxes must be stored somewhere. Just because our neatly stacked rows of boxes happened to form a hollow center, does not deem our stacking inefficient. I would suggest our dual-purpose structure actually declares us as even more so.

So if you are looking for two independent contractors who have experience with box construction and pride themselves in efficiency, I know some girls who can be of service.