The Box Factory (Short Story)

I think my employer is some kind of secret Government behavioral experiment. I have a number of reasons for this suspicion. It’s not a conclusion I’ve reached lightly.

The company itself is not one you have ever heard of. When I first started I was told we used a “numbered company” and were a subsidiary of a much larger company (though I was never told the name.) Our office has no sign on it, nor any identifying marks. By looking at the office, you couldn’t tell what it is we do.

As far as I know, we manufacture boxes: cardboard boxes. I say “as far as I know”, because I have never seen the warehouse, nor the production facility, nor head office .. and no one I have worked with ever has. I don’t know who our clients are, nor do I know how many boxes we sell. All I know is my job, which is in quality control. I’m not sure that it matters, but I found the job listing in the want ads, and was given it with the barest of interviews. I know for a fact that they did not check one of my job references.

My job, basically, is to look at boxes (which arrive in OTHER boxes), and determine whether or not they are damaged. I look at the box. If there is no damage, I initial a “No Damage” report, and put it in a stack. The box, I put in a “no damage pile.” If there IS damage on the box, I fill out a “Damaged Box” report, which basically has a list of damage types, as well as a comment box for me to hand write any observations about any damage I can see on the box. The box goes into a “damaged pile.”

You may be asking yourself “Why on earth would anyone do this?” Well, I have no idea. To me, it makes no sense whatsoever. The time and expense involved in shipping and cataloging cardboard box damage seems ridiculous. Much as I have tried to find out, no one seems to know much. My manager told me we are just tiny cogs in a big wheel. My co-workers didn’t know and mostly, didn’t care.

Early on, I decided to quit: it all seemed strange, and frankly, silly. I was hired on as a quality control officer (I have a background in it) but all I ever did was evaluate cardboard box damage. Literally, for eight hours a day, I would look at boxes, fill out the forms, and stack the boxes in a pile.

I was about to quit and find something more interesting, and more challenging, but before I could, my boss called a meeting. I was being promoted, and my wage raised by an amount I thought was a mistake. It was about a thirty percent increase, and was apparently related to the successful conclusion of my probationary period. I re-thought my plan to quit, as I was now making over seventy thousand dollars a year to assess cardboard boxes.

Shortly after that, things started to really get strange.

I work in an office with about ten other people. The office is quite large, and each of us has our own section. Every morning, our sections are stacked with the days boxes; I’ve never seen it happen but when I come in in the morning, I always have stacks of boxes waiting for me (as do my co-workers.) We each work on our own stack, and occasionally get together for coffee breaks, or team meetings, or whatever else. We have one manager, who has his own office. He walks around during the day, checking our progress: he seems to take copious notes on each of us, maybe even moreso for me. He always seems to write a little extra when he’s overseeing me, in particular.

One day, the manager did not show up. We didn’t think too much of it .. everyone is entitled to a sick day after all. Then it was two days .. then three. We never saw that man, again, ever, and we have no idea what happened to him. When payday came around, we were all worried that we wouldn’t get paid .. but, our cheques were there, in the morning, sitting on the managers desk. It seems strange in retrospect, but we all just sort of went with it. We handed out the paychecks, and kept at our work. We never really needed anything from our manager, and the boxes kept showing up .. so we just kept at it.

Around this time, I started to notice some strange things. The first thing was, the boxes started to repeat. Some of the damage done to the boxes was rather unique: a strange shaped puncture, or maybe an odd colored stain. I started seeing the same boxes come through, more than once. Although none of it made much sense to start with, it made even less sense that I was seeing the boxes more than once.

A second thing was the carpet. I left on a Friday, and the carpet was gray. I came back in a Monday, and the carpet was blue. It wasn’t new carpet, either: that might make sense. No, this new carpet was as worn as the old carpet .. just a different color. I asked a couple of co-workers about it and none of them knew what I was talking about. They said it had always been blue. I KNOW it was gray. I have a bit of a thing with color and could almost tell you the pantone code of the old carpet.

There was a third little oddity, and it was the last of the “strange but harmless” things that happened. We came in one morning to find a stack of newspapers for each of us. The depth of the stack corresponded precisely to the length of time we’d all been employed. By this time I’d been there six months, so my stack was about a hundred and eighty newspapers. Upon inspection, we found that the newspapers had each been modified for each of us. For each of us, one word was selected, and that word was hi-lighted in every newspaper. My word was “that”, and someone had taken the time to hi-light every instance of that word, in ever paper. All the words selected were common words, like the, this, that, here, there, etc.

Although this was all relatively harmless, there was no denying that it was very, very strange. Our investigative spirits were raised, and we met at length on what might be going on. We tried to figure out how long it would take someone to do this, to hilight thousands of newspapers, and by our calculations we were well into years of man hours. Who would spend YEARS of labour to hilight random words in these newspapers? And why?