There have been some very different
flavours to my week in Warenannahme,
the delivery warehouse. Below I attempt to elaborate on three of my most
salient impressions.
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If at some point in my life, following a
profound turn for the worse in my personal fortunes I resolve to become a
highwayman, I know where I’ll set up shop. Namely, on a short stretch of the B4
between Hammerbrook and the old fish market. There, at a little before 6am on
weekdays, two trucks drive westwards from Pinkertweg in the North Elbe marshes
to the Alsterhaus on the Binnernalster. The wares they carry are diverse, and
vary from day to day, with expense and luxury their only shared characteristics.
In the last week, I have seen ranks of Hugo
Boss suits, stacks of La Prairie skin cream and crates of Veuve Clicquot champagne
pass into the department store stockrooms. It was a little overwhelming
initially – but you get accustomed surprisingly quickly to transporting cartons
worth a solid chunk of the average German’s yearly salary.
I think that’s partly because some things
lose their essential characteristics when taken outside their context. In a store, you are inclined to view every item with a critical eye in
judging whether it corresponds with your taste, your lifestyle, your image of
yourself. Working with the same items in a warehouse requires the opposite
response – unthinking, uncritical dispassion. As my co-workers kept
reinforcing, it’s better not to ask too many questions.
This philosophy kind of dissolves the
prestige of the objects we deal with – they’re not objects of desire, as they
are when placed in a shop window, but rather they become synonymous with a set of tasks to be
undertaken and completed. If anyone needs weaning off the excessive
fetishisation of goods in our consumerist society, send them to work in a
luxury store warehouse. It’ll do them the power of good.
To return to my initial comment, I think that if I had to
become a criminal, highway robbery is one of the cleverer picks. Not because
it’s any less reprehensible than the others, but rather because it’s so
strikingly anachronistic. In the same way we can’t think of pirates today
without initially picturing a wooden leg and a parrot on the shoulder,
“highwayman” conjures images of daring and bravado. And like pirates, our
perception of them isn’t an unambiguously negative one; figures like Robin Hood
and Ned Kelly for instance are at worst morally complex, and at best national heroes! When
you add to this the expression “highway robbery”, used in contemporary language
to refer to normal purchases made at an unfairly high price, it seems that
everything today is conspiring to trivialise and romanticise what is basically
a worse form of mugging.
 |
| I'm sold. |
So if job-hunting after university turns
sour, look out for me in the streets of downtown Hamburg – homeless, but clad in a
Belstaff leather jacket and eating a tin of Beluga caviar.
---
The goods aren’t brought in by barges
through the canals, as they once were. And the early morning arguments over
misplaced goods are in Turkish and Ibo, rather than Gutnish and Frisian. The
hours are shorter, the warehouse lighting more incandescent, and the rat I
watched scamper between the crates on Thursday morning, I hope, less
plague-ridden.
But there is still something fundamentally
Hanseatic about working at 6am in a Hamburg warehouse, with the soft light of
the Baltic summer dawn flowing into the dusty loading bay. I
know it’s a little fanciful, maybe even contrived, but it’s an aspect of the
experience I could rarely keep from my mind for long.
 |
| The Bleichenfleet canal leads almost directly to the Alsterhaus back entrance |
I should explain that the Hanseatic League
and its influence on modern Germany is the object of my academic study for this
year, in the form of my 8,000 word Year Abroad Project. If I ever get around to
starting work on the reading list’s 88 titles (thanks again Dr Kant!), some
more writing on it can be expected here.
You may never have heard of the Hanseatic
League. There’s no shame in that – I’d never heard about it either, right up
until the first time I did. When I came to learn a little more, I was struck by
the significance of the league’s achievements, and was surprised it wasn’t
better known.
The League was composed of a number of
medieval trading posts, mostly lining or near to the Baltic Sea, and was the
most powerful economic confederation of the Middle Ages. It formed what was, in
the eyes of some, the first large common market, stretching from western Russia to
the Netherlands and the British Isles, but with its core in the German cities
of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg. The common pursuit of mercantile interests
brought about a stable and relatively peaceful cooperative, which in many ways
anticipated the structures and stated goals of the modern European Union (just
as it prefigured many of the EU’s failures). For me, it is the relative
political autonomy and primitive democratic institutions which are of the
greatest interest, and I plan on researching how those traditions continue to
influence Hamburg today, still officially styled as a “free and Hanseatic
city”.
 |
| It doesn't take a degree in languages to translate the top line. |
As suggested, I’m yet to start that
research. Perhaps that’s what allowed my groundless, uninformed perception of a
“Hanseatic” image or feel to take root in the last week of work. If so, then I’m glad
for my relative ignorance on the subject just for the moment – it has given rise to that
fantastical, idealistic and deeply personal conception of the past which is at
once both stupid and sacred. That will be the sacrifice as I begin work on the
project this year – I can only hope the fascinating reality of the Hanse’s long
history will provide an equally compelling recompense.
---
It’s very nice to talk about the pretty
morning light on the warehouse floor. But those transporting moments were few
in a week which for me felt overwhelmingly real. It was the first time I’d
properly worked in manual labour, and I had expected it to be physically tough.
In fact, it wasn’t really. Of course there was the odd strain heaving heavy boxes
onto palettes or rollers, and the aromas of the on-site garbage compressor
weren’t particularly pleasant, but it was all pretty bearable.
What was tough was the mental side. Not
because it was intellectually challenging, but rather the opposite – it
presented something of an intellectual vacuum. Procedure and orders dominated,
meaning that there was rarely any stimulus for independent thought or
problem-solving. This frustrated me, because I’m used to exercising my mind
regularly, if only by virtue of being within some schooling context or other
for the last fifteen years.
But it wasn’t just me it frustrated. I
spent a lot of the time talking with a man who came originally from Nigeria
(and hence spoke perfect English, along with Ibo and second-language German).
While thankful for the opportunity to work, earning money for his family back
home, he was just as conscious of the job’s mental void as I was. He told me
about the ways he tried to deal with it, by joking with his co-workers,
laughing more. That helped a little, but only as long as there was work to be
done. In the warehouse, often that isn’t the case – the vapid pushing about of
cartons is poorly complemented by the idle hours of waiting between the
departure of the loading trucks and the arrival of the post, or after the post
is gone and the palettes have been stacked.
 |
| Not much going on here. |
It can’t feel very inspiring working in an
environment like that, and I wouldn’t wish that mental stultification on anyone,
least of all a hard-working, ambitious, trilingual immigrant. It’s essential
work which people need to do – and of course, it requires a certain amount of
skill and experience to do well, both of which I lacked. But I think being
placed in the shoes of a warehouse worker for a week (literally, actually) has helped
me begin to appreciate what is hardest about this line of work, and it’s not
what I’d expected. People want to use their minds when at work, and that can be
just as true for warehouse hands as it is for management consultants. I think
that has been the lesson of the week, and it’s a thought I intend to hold
onto.
--------------------------
Now, with my week in the warehouse over, I’m
moving into the relatively cushy department of customer service for the next
three. Not sure exactly what it will entail, but I’ll no doubt find out soon.
Wish me luck!
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