I saw the box fall in slow motion. I watched in total fear as it went flying over the dividing wall and into the space that my manager was working. “There’s no way it could hit him right?” I thought to myself. Then, to my horror, I heard a deep and ominous yell coming from the other side of the wall.

                                                                           * * *

My friends and I were eager to start our new summer job. We had just finished freshman year of highschool and my friend Matthew had told us about this job he had gotten at a new tech company called Vivacity Tech. We thought it sounded great, it paid pretty well and it looked like a fun job. There wasn’t even an interview for the job, we just had to send the company an email. They also had an offer where if you recommended a friend to work at the job, you would get paid $50 per friend. I recommended two of my friends, Andy and Orison. Andy recommended his sister Katie, and Katie recommended her friend Clair. We were all excited to all start working together with our friends.

We started our first day of work about a week after school. Once we got to the headquarters of Vivacity tech, we first filled out some forms in the office, and then we started the orientation. One of the managers, Leah, led us to the warehouse, where we would be doing our job. They instructed us on all the things we would be doing over the next couple months. The job seemed pretty simple, we just had to set up and log into chromebooks, and neatly put them in a Vivacity branded box, and then throw away the original chromebook box. They even had a refrigerator with unlimited drinks for us to have in the warehouse. “Could this job get any better?” I thought to myself. We got three paid breaks during the day, one in the morning, one for lunch, and one in the afternoon, and we could have as many free snacks as we wanted from the break room. It seemed too good to be true. “This job is going to be so fun,” I said to my friends Andy and Orison. Orison responded, “Yeah bro this is awesome”. Andy agreed.

It had been multiple weeks since we had started the job, and the work dynamic at Vivacity had changed a lot over those two weeks. For about the first week of the job, my friends and I didn’t treat the job very seriously, we often messed around while on the clock and we all talked while we worked, and this really annoyed the managers there. After the first week, the managers became way more strict on us all of a sudden. They separated our friend group into different working areas, I still worked in the same area as Andy though. They constantly had managers watching us to the point where it was excessive. One of our managers, Ryan, was particularly terrifying. He seemed to love yelling at kids, and whenever any one of us made a small mistake, he would yell very loudly at them. “Ryan must be salty that he’s being forced to look after highschoolers” I joked to my friend Andy. “Ha ha yeah,” Andy responded. “And he gets mad at the dumbest stuff, it honestly stresses me out.” Andy and I were pretty afraid of Ryan, he had yelled at us and cursed us out a couple times, and we felt like we didn’t deserve it because after the first week of work, we had developed a better work ethic and we felt like we had been working much harder. As if Ryan could sense us talking about him, He walked over to me and said, “Hey you! Come recycle cardboard,” In an authoritative tone. I hesitantly walked over to the cardboard compactor with him, as working alone with Ryan watching you was one of the scariest things ever. He watched me like a hawk while I threw the cardboard boxes from the chromebooks into the compactor.

About a week later, something unusual was happening in the warehouse. Vivacity was replacing the old cardboard compactor with a larger one, to accommodate for all of the newfound chromebook purchases they were getting. But while we all waited for the new compactor to arrive, we had no compactor to use in the meantime because the old one had been sold in order to help pay for the new compactor. We still had to put the chromebook boxes somewhere, so a large pile of chromebook boxes started to develop inside of the warehouse. The pile was located right next to a divider wall that was about 15 feet high but didn’t reach the ceiling of the warehouse. At this point the pile of boxes was starting to get so high that we had to resort to throwing boxes on top of the pile in order to get them up on top. The workers had titled it “Mt. Cardboard” because of the box pile’s sheer scale.

“Alright I’m done,” I said to Andy as Andy and I finished setting up a couple batches of chromebooks. We decided it was time again to throw our leftover cardboard boxes onto the heap of cardboard again, like we had done many times before for the past couple days. We walked over to the mountain of cardboard while carrying our boxes. We were somewhat in awe because everytime we made the journey to the mountain, it seemed to have grown a couple feet. Andy threw his boxes first, not even getting them to the peak of the mountain. I was determined to throw my boxes far and high enough so that they could get all the way to the top, so I decided my best bet was to throw my boxes like a frisbee. I grabbed a box, gripped it tightly like a disc golf driver, wound up, and released all my energy and might into the throw. The moment I released the box from my fingertips; I knew what I had done wrong. I had released too early, meaning the box was flying too far to the left, and this happened to be right in the direction of the space above the dividing wall that divided the area where the pile of cardboard was and the area where my manager Ryan worked. I saw the box fall in slow motion. I watched in total fear as it went flying over the dividing wall and into the space that my manager was working. “There’s no way it could hit him right?” I thought to myself. Then, to my horror, I heard a deep and ominous yell coming from the other side of the wall. I could recognize that yell from a thousand miles away. Ryan, the manager I feared the most, had been hit by the cardboard box I threw. My heart rate rose to an astronomical level. I heard his thunderous footsteps coming from behind the wall, moving towards my direction. I peered over at Andy, and I could tell he knew that I was in serious trouble. “WHO. THREW. THAT.” Ryan snarled as he made his way over to Andy and I. “I- It was me,” I reluctantly said. “YOU HIT ME RIGHT IN MY HEAD! YOU ARE A DANGER TO THE WORKPLACE!” he screamed at me. “I am so, so sorry,” I said in an attempt to calm him down, but it didn’t work. “Go. Home. Now!” He commanded me. “Okay” I said, even though I knew I couldn’t get a ride home until later that day when I would have usually been done with work. I quickly grabbed my bags and walked outside of the warehouse, just wanting to escape the place. I sat outside waiting for about an hour until Andy got off work, and then his mom drove us home.

To my surprise, they didn’t fire me after the incident. The next day I came in and I had to meet with the company CEO to talk about how I needed to be safer in the first place. I didn’t bring up the fact that he and the managers had allowed a giant cardboard pile to form in the warehouse, which I wouldn’t exactly consider “safe”. After that day, any small amount of respect Ryan had for me was gone. He made sure to be extra harsh on me, and was always watching to make sure I wasn’t “slacking off”.I made sure to be more careful from then on, and I decided I would never throw a box like a frisbee ever again in that warehouse.