The Pallet Count I Bring Home With Me

Dana pointed this out to me, not the other way around, which is how I know it’s true and not just something I decided about myself. We were playing something with a scoring track, doesn’t matter which one, and she said I count out loud the same way I do when I’m reading off a receiving manifest at work, flat and fast, no inflection, like I’m confirming a shipment instead of tallying points I actually care about winning.

I run the stockroom and receiving crew at a hardware and outdoor-supply warehouse outside Spokane. Most days that means pallets in, pallets out, counting what came off a truck against what the paperwork says should have come off the truck, and doing it fast enough that the driver isn’t standing around burning daylight. You develop a rhythm for it. Numbers in groups, checked against a total, no room for a number that feels approximately right, because approximately right is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a shortage nobody can explain three weeks later.

I didn’t think that rhythm would follow me home until Dana said something about it, and once she said it I couldn’t unhear it in myself. Scoring a points-salad game at the end of a session, I’m doing the exact same thing, breaking the board into sections, counting each one in a fixed order, running a subtotal instead of eyeballing a big number at the end. Marcus does this differently, he just adds as he goes card by card, and it drives me a little nuts watching him do it because I’m positive he’s going to miscount and he almost never does.

It’s not really about accuracy, if I’m honest with myself, and for a long stretch I did all of it without ever really thinking about why. A missed point on a board game doesn’t cost anyone anything the way a missed pallet does. It’s that the counting itself has become a kind of decompression, a task my hands and eyes know how to do without my brain having to work very hard at it, which after eight hours of the actual job is sometimes exactly what I want from the last twenty minutes of a game night. Not another decision. Just a count I already know how to run.

I’ve started noticing it in other places too. I count steps up to the porch. I count how many lights are green on my drive home, which is a stupid thing to track and I do it anyway. Dana thinks it’s funny, mostly, and she’s not wrong to. It’s a strange kind of specialization to bring home from a job, this need to know an exact number instead of a rough one, but it turns out it’s useful more places than the receiving dock. Every scoring track I’ve ever miscounted, I’ve miscounted in the other direction, undercounting myself, never the other way, which either says something about a stockroom habit of double-checking your own work before anyone else’s, or it just says I’m bad at math when the stakes are personal. Could be either. I haven’t decided.