Warehouse

San Antonio has a problem with homeless people. I don't know how many homeless people we have relative to other cities, but we have them and they're fairly visible. There was some law passed a couple of years ago whereby one could be fined or otherwise made subject to legal action should you be seen aiding a homeless, even just giving one a sandwich or a can of pop. I don't know if this law is still in place because I don't actively seek out information which might facilitate my expressing indignation on social media, but I haven't heard about it having been dropped; and I have heard about House Bill 1925 which criminalises homeless encampments and which was winging its way to the desk of Russ Abbott, our state governor, just a few months ago. Given Russ Abbott's previous Trumpesque form whereby the value of a decision is quantified by how much it will annoy liberals, I'm sure he'll think it's a wonderful idea.

The notion of discouraging homeless persons by fining those who provide food seemed calculated to diminish vagrancy around the more picturesque parts of the city centre where tourists with big wallets might happen to pass by. I seem to recall that, in official terms, the law was intended to concentrate all those bums and park tramps in the general vicinity of recognised homeless shelters and soup kitchens - mostly at some distance from the Alamo by happy coincidence. I have become unfortunately accustomed to persons who think in this way, persons such as the genius who posted on Next Door to announce that he would be standing for election and would appreciate our support. He'd noticed a lot of homelesses along Austin Highway and was going to solve the problem by taxing them. I guess if those lazy homelesses suddenly found a chunk of their wages being siphoned off by the city treasury, they might buck up their ideas and start living in houses. I don't really see the logic in this proposal but then I've never read Ayn Rand.

In related news, my stepson occasionally engages in volunteer work for a homeless charity. This is something to do with his school which expects so many hours of volunteer work from him each year, and which somehow counts towards his 'O' levels or whatever the hell it is happens at the end. He's volunteered at the local zoo, which I understand mostly involves him standing around and lecturing complete strangers on animal facts and statistics regardless of whether or not they asked. This seems to relate to the sort of thing he wants to do when he leaves school, and is more or less what he does anyway, so that's handy. He also spent some time volunteering at a retirement community, either calling out bingo numbers or providing hand massages with moisturiser, but he wasn't quite so keen on that one for some reason. The work for the homeless charity is usually either parcelling up boxes of food and the like, or else working in one of the kitchens at which the homeless get to eat without anyone being fined.

It probably comes as no surprise that his various volunteer jobs have been somewhat thin on the ground during the pandemic, but things seemed to be starting up again, and so my wife put him down for packing boxes as soon as it became an option. She also put herself down for a shift, and me too. I don't remember exactly why, but it seemed like something to do.

We were given a time and place at which we showed up along with about a hundred others, possibly more, and were all herded into a warehouse of the kind with which I am quite familiar, having worked in many similar places over the years. The biggest difference was not so much that the boxes we'd all be slugging around contained food as that those present actively wanted to be there, presumably having lived lives which had spared them from working a conveyor belt. We were mostly teenagers or suburban housewives with big smiles, clean clothes, and a can do attitude; as distinct from employees of Parcel Force, few of whom had any better options.

The deal was that we'd each pick a place along the conveyor belt. One group of people were given the task of assembling cardboard boxes and setting them on the belt. The rest of us worked in teams, opening up packages of bottled fruit juice, breakfast cereal, tinned food - whatever had been donated or otherwise procured - and filling the boxes. Bess, myself and the boy took up position right at the start of the belt. My job was to collect newly assembled boxes from the people behind me and set them on the belt. Junior opened up packages of apple juice and set each bottle on a trestle table, and Bess transferred a single bottle to each box before shoving it along so that the next people in line could add a carton of breakfast cereal, and so on and so on until the box was full by the time it reached the other end. It was boring and repetitive but it was good exercise - the sort of task which becomes automatic after the first few minutes. There were seven or eight people working behind me, all pulling flat boxes from a pack, pushing them out, taping up the bottom, and stacking them ready.

I did this for about an hour and came to the peculiar realisation that I kind of miss this sort of manual labour. There's something satisfying about its sheer relentless physicality, although it doubtless helped that no-one was going for maximum productivity by overloading the workforce to its absolute limit as they did at Parcel Force - a job which involved more yelling than any I've done before or since.

We had a ten minute break after about an hour, then got back to it for the second half. Junior began to struggle, having apparently been thrown by the arrival of a different brand of apple juice, the bottles of which could not be lifted from the packaging with quite the same fluid motion as before. I told him to take over what I'd been doing on the grounds that I have more experience as a mindlessly labouring cog in a machine so it didn't make much difference to me. The new bottles were indeed a pain in the arse compared to the previous type, but it was otherwise fine, and so we all chugged away for another hour. Metal things cracked and banged and echoed around the vast, cavernous space, and the radio cranked out distorted hits of the seventies and eighties. It was all strangely familiar, but less depressing for being a one off deal.

Neither Bess nor myself recall how many boxes we made up at the end of the two hours, but it seemed like a lot, and it felt as though we'd done something good. I have no idea how much difference any of it will have made to those who'll receive one of our boxes, but hopefully it will be a help on some level; and it at least seemed more productive than any of the endless whining about people who live out of borrowed shopping carts making the place look untidy.