Before dawn breaks, before baristas open their sleepy eyes and bakeries spill their beckoning scent into the wind, I have witnessed the goliath that is 13,000 pairs of socks. There are 603 styles, 140 boxes, 26,000 strips of wool welcoming me to 6:45 a.m. In one week I’ll touch practically every one. My hands and the cardboard boxes will wear on each other in precisely the same places until both are raw.
And then those raw hands will return. They’ll drift again through pre-dawn streets, clutching a fresh thermos of coffee like a life preserver and clambering up the frosted-over loading dock to pull hard on its metal door. But as the loading dock door screeches along its tracks and warm light floods out onto the concrete dock, it’s not just socks waiting for me. Inside that little loading dock off Church and Cherry is an underground audio enclave that taught me how listening — to podcasts, to audiobooks, to each other — can turn work into life, and a job into a community.
I spent two years at the Outdoor Gear Exchange — an indie gear shop in Burlington, Vt. — before leaving last month to start as a producer at Audible Originals. The four months I spent lifting boxes and slinging socks as a warehouse receiver were by far my favorite.
When I’m at the warehouse, every day starts the same way: earbuds in, even before before my frozen fingers have thawed. It’s quiet this early; five or so people exchanging knowing nods of greeting before drifting off like so many leaves on a dark pond. I pick up a clipboard, a stack of green sheets, and enter into the rhythm of restock — find, reach, repeat. Replacing everything that sold yesterday with a fresh round today. Socks and shoelaces, camp stoves and carabiners, ropes, sacks, and helmets, all falling into my plastic bin as my cart rolls gently through the dark aisles. And through earbuds, my chosen narrative unfurls.
In so many ways, this is a respite. To simultaneously dedicate your body to a task and your mind to a story, completely, is an uncommon luxury. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Stephanie Loscalzo rolls in on her bicycle even before the rest of us — 5:45 a.m. — to work before her 9-5 as an academic advisor for international students at the University of Vermont Grossman School of Business. Loscalzo worked in the warehouse before moving to Florida for grad school. Coming back to Vermont — where cost of living is high and work scarce — was both a choice and a sacrifice. Personally, I can’t imagine a more beautiful place to live than Vermont, with its wild forests, clear cold streams, and tall cliffs echoing the angles of the sun. But it takes creativity to make ends meet.
That’s where the warehouse comes in. A second job makes it financially feasible to live here. And on top of that, the warehouse offers beautiful moments of solitude and contemplation. You can put on a podcast while you work — a TED Radio Hour on the power of quiet, or a Reply All on a pug lost to the internet — and listen carefully enough to learn and feel something you might not otherwise have had the focus for. The mindlessness of restock gives people like Loscalzo — and me — the chance to step away from distractions and listen to these stories the way they’re meant to be heard. You learn something you can share when you go home. And the rest of your day is better for it.
But that sharing doesn’t always wait for home. As restock ends and lights flick on across the store and behind freshly caffeinated eyes, a contagion is spreading. I told Amanda about Limetown. Amanda brought Risk! to Bekah and Scott. Bekah passed on Sword and Scale to Ben, who gave it to me. Everyone seems to listen to Radiolab, but that might be because the web department does without headphones, blaring the voices of Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad for the whole basement to hear.
And that’s the beauty of this place. Earbuds are always there for escape. If you hate the podcast or music that’s playing at any given time, feel free to duck out. But so much is shared through listening together. I remember a day in October: a Sunday afternoon, sun-soaked air still full of dead leaves and orange light. There was a handful of us in the warehouse tagging together. Alan pulled up a This American Lifeepisode we’d never heard before: “No Map”. He thought it was about getting lost in the woods. I’m not totally sure he would have picked it if he knew what was coming.
Half an hour in, Ira Glass announces that it’s time for “Act II … Act II: Where’s King Solomon When You Need Him?” The story turns out to be a roller coaster of emotions in which a little girl is taken from her family under the pretext of adoption, raised, given back, taken back, and given back again. At every twist and turn in this little girl’s fate, me and the four tall, usually reserved men working beside me shout, “Nooo!!!!!! … wait … No!!!!” I remember the credits being read and looking around at my cohort, each of us sharing a moment of shock and realization and disbelief, and then noticing that most of our tagging had somehow completed itself via the anxious acceleration of our hands. That kind of community is invaluable, not just in a warehouse, but in any workplace. To share an experience charged with such emotion is to bond in a way that’s hard to replicate.
Sometimes, though, the bond is already there, just waiting to be uncovered. Maggie Lawrence and Nick DeSantis both work in the warehouse, and both of their partners are social workers. Another Vermont social worker, Lara Sobel, was killed last summer leaving her office — shot twice with a .27 caliber rifle by a woman who, the week before, had lost custody of her child. The heartbreak that followed was shared throughout the community, but for those in the unique position of social workers’ partners, there wasn’t much to alleviate their new fear.
The winter after Lara Sobel’s death, local podcast Rumble Strip Vermont put out an episode called “Inside DCF”. The episode featured social workers and their families, talking about what it’s like to put their lives on the line in a field not often recognized for its dangers. Nick listened to the story at work and shared it with Maggie. And through it they were able to connect with each other and provide some camaraderie in a position that would otherwise have felt isolating.
That culture — the blending of solitude and community — is what makes the OGE warehouse such an amazing place to work, and so much of it comes from the shared experience of listening. People come to the warehouse from all over. This is a career, a second job, a stepping stone, or (for one floundering freelancer) a saving grace. OGE warehouse workers spend their days learning, connecting and forging the lives they want, all while keeping a local business moving at full steam. And not a day goes by in the new challenge of New York that I don’t try to replicate the experience. When it’s time to hop on the train, I put my earbuds in.
From hundreds of hours of communal and individual listening, OGE staffers share a hand-picked selection of podcasts and audiobooks to keep your mind busy throughout the workday:
