One Night on the Job

A night of replenishment shipment is simple enough--open 30-500 boxes of clothing. There are large boxes bearing one pair of socks, small boxes packed tightly with individually plastic wrapped shirts emblazoned with a "Live Green, Save the Earth" slogan, and medium sized boxes content to hold haphazardly unfolded items like puzzle pieces in our giant store of a puzzle. Our goal with this chaotic pile of Gap logos is to sort, fold, hang, and put them in their homes within a short number of hours, leaving us approximately five minutes to haul the boxes and bags of plastic wrapping to the, hopefully empty, dumpster.

There are, in the employment of GapInc., special individuals who daily sip lattes behind desks while accruing six figure incomes. Faceless and opinionated, these people control our every movement. Their whims are the why and how to the horrendous combinations adorning our mannequins, erratic signing and unsigning of various promations that may or may not last until the end of the week...We live and breathe for their next request!
These anonymities tell us to move the girls striped, glitter, logo tees from the feature table to hanging faced out, to hanging sideways, to half folded on a wall shelf, all in the time frame of three weeks, ending the process about three days before marking them down and re-hanging them for the clearance rounder, beginning their sad journey from
"awesomely cool shirt" to "bargain shirt mom picked out."

Yes, they are the very same brains who decide how many hours shipment will take, and they base it on highly scientific data, scavenged, no doubt, by our "favorite" scientist whose lab coat covers his "Favorite Athletic Tee, Favorite Flat Front Khakis", and boxers with pretzels on them which he picked up for .97 cents at some Gap Outlet.....And with all respect to his scientific data, replenishment shipment has never finished on schedule