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The Sermon on the StallI was at work the other day, unloading a nasty batch of porcelain lamps with two or three other guys. Hot, hard, heavy work, and we all were bitching long and loud about it. "Oh, the futility of it all," we moaned. The guys made no bones about how much they hated working the docks like this, day in and day out, with the shipments never stopping or even slowing down. They'd been at it for years, and seemed pretty bitter about it. Midway through the load, exhausted, my hands and back throbbing like mad, dripping with sweat, I took a few seconds off and headed to the bathroom. It was a grungy place--one urinal, one stall, a crumbling sink, walls that weren't exactly pristine if you get my drift. I went into the stall expecting to find the place scribbled with everything from f-word tirades to rants against the establishment to phone numbers of local scabies-carrying prostitutes. What I found was one message, written in a black magic marker:
What's something like this doing on a dock restroom wall? Where's the other stuff, the curses, the vulgarity? This is a place where the f-word is dropped like it's "the," where the boss is generally regarded as more or less equal to a neo-Nazi child molester. Where's all the stuff on the filty bathroom walls that says this? Then I began to wonder, who put that there? Surely not one of those disgruntled dockworkers I was just talking with. Maybe a truck driver passing through on a lonely Sunday. Maybe the boss himself, in a scheme to get his employees to clean up and shape up.
Before my mind went any further, I stopped. I asked myself if I really
wanted to know who put that message there, and why. I told myself that it was
just there, and that was that. Make no mistake about it, I said to myself,
dockworking is a tough profession, very tough. As tough as any such job out
there, probably. But it's a job. It pays money, and it's honest work. Nobody
dies doing it, and nobody robs anybody else doing it. Sure, it's a royal
pain, but the pain ends after the day's done. How much stress comes with a
job like this? How many important decisions do you have to make? How many
lives do you hold in your hands?
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© Jason Seals