The second shift casepack department comprised 20 associates. Rob was a "reach truck" driver who had worked at the Kmart distribution center for four years. When our shift let out at 12:30 a.m., he left to deliver papers for the Denver Post. He then rose at 6 to start his other job at the carpet upholstery business he hoped would become his mainstay. He saw his two kids for a few hours on the weekends and rarely got five hours of sleep.

Amanda was 19 and perpetually indignant. She lived with her parents and 4-year-old son. The start of each shift found her sprinting through the plant to punch in on time. John was a retired college recruiter whose dreams of raising cattle were dashed when a hailstorm decimated his hay crop and forced him to sell most of his herd. He worked part time for the health benefits. We talked about baseball and the merits of beer vs. whiskey, the latter of which he was a great proponent of. Two weeks into the job, he confided to me: "This place sucks."

Charles was our shift manager, a veteran, a family man and a platitudinous bore. On my first day as a Kmart associate, he gave me his standard new hire speech: "I believe we're here to do the job we're paid to do and go home. It's not complicated. As it says in the associate handbook, your production goal is to throw 360 boxes an hour. That's six boxes a minute. Achieve that and you're a success. I am here to make you a success." He was well-suited for Kmart -- the plant was littered with block-lettered posters: "AIM FOR QUALITY!" "YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!" and the ever-menacing "THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER!"

I told my fellow associates an assortment of embellished truths and outright lies, dressing down my past and changing the subject when I had to. My friends at home, in my other life, were convinced that I would stand out, that my middle-class demeanor would expose me as the impostor proletarian I was. But I learned early on that my Kmart coworkers couldn't care less about where I came from. If I was suspected of anything, it was of not being smart enough to find another job. Why, they wondered, would a single guy like me -- a kid, practically, with no family to support -- drive 25 miles from Boulder every day to a job that had little to offer apart from the health coverage? Still, no one gave it much thought.

Work at the Kmart distribution center was a series of aggravations. Conveyor belts jammed; there were vicious splinters and cardboard cuts. Boxes fell on our heads from second-tier slots; a case of cat litter left Amanda's face black and blue. Pallets, cheap and splintery with protruding nails, were the bane of the casepack associate. It was our responsibility to throw them into designated pallet slots after we cleared the boxes on top. Some weighed 60 pounds and it was not uncommon to throw 100 during the course of a shift. Since we were constantly peeling labels, wearing gloves would have significantly reduced our production rate. My hands quickly grew chapped and calloused.

Speed was paramount at Kmart -- our goal was to maintain a 48-hour turnaround in stocking store merchandise, a demanding standard that still looked lazy compared to that of Walmart, the undisputed master of distribution, which boasts of a 24-hour turnaround. If a package of Bounty paper towels was purchased from a Kmart store on Wednesday, by Friday that item had been ordered, pulled from the distribution center by someone like me and restocked on the shelves.

Casepack associates worked from stacks of computer generated labels that we carried in tin pouches hooked onto our thick leather belts. Matching the numbers on our labels with the numbered storage slots in the warehouse, we peeled off the adhesive backing, placed the labels on the boxes in the storage slots and then hurled those boxes onto the conveyor belt -- over and over and over again until cleanup. Once they'd been sorted according to their destination, the boxes were loaded onto trucks bound for one of 116 Kmart stores throughout the Rocky Mountain states.

Distribution centers, or D.C.s, are big, airplane-hangar big. The walk from the parking lot to the time clock took nearly 10 minutes. The P.A. system was essential; it regularly chimed in the status of outgoing batches, alerted associates to jammed lines and paged supervisors and managers. Everyone had a reason to use it.

"John DICKer, please dial 389. John DICKer, dial 389."

Including Jim.

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