I was taken to a small warehouse of approximately 2,000 square meter size outside the property with all sorts of rubbish scattered and piled up, disorganised. At first, I thought this could be the warehouse where I was tortured that night, but I don't recall it being this spacious and airy.

The warehouse was too messy and musty, I felt sick to the stomach just by entering it. My instinct told me that they could be hiding bodies of their dead victims here before they discarded them away. I prayed I wouldn't find any underneath the cluttered piles. 

"You need to clean this up by noon," Nick instructed with a cigarette wedged between his lips. "New orders will arrive by tomorrow morn so we need the space empty to load them in."

"Where are the other guys?" I spun around, expected an extra pair of hands to help me up with the mess.

"There are no other guys. Shortage of manpower, remember?" he reminded me, taking a few puffs of his cigarette.

"You can't be serious? I can't be doing this on my own," I objected.

"Jack managed it on his own before he died," he countered.

"But Jack is a man."

"What's the difference?" he exhaled his smoke. "Equal rights, equal fights."

I plodded through a stack of pallets, tangled electric cables, used parcel boxes of various sizes, used car batteries, shredded printed materials and some other materials, fabrics, substances I couldn't make out of, all jumbled up in one big pile. The flooring was covered with mud and oil stain making it harder for me to walk around. But I was supplied with whatever cleaning materials, relevant tools and trolleys needed for me to do the work.

The clean-up was painstakingly exhausting but gradually turned possible halfway through. Initially, I sorted them out according to types of materials, but an hour was wasted away just by doing so. So, I clustered them into a sizable amount that could fit in a trash bag and stuffed them accordingly before putting them into general waste bins.

Once done, I scrubbed off the muddy stain and oil dirt covering half of the warehouse floor with much effort. Secretly, I was glad I made the right decision to have two sandwiches at Greggs on my way here.

It was already 20 past 12.00 pm when Nick came in to see my progress. I expected he would be impressed that I was able to finish them within time but the frown on his face said otherwise. He scanned around the warehouse and inspected the general waste bins that I arranged in a row by the entrance, one by one.

"What's inside this bag?" he queried, putting on a pair of safety gloves while peering into one of the waste bins.

"All of it. Whatever those rubbish inside this warehouse," I answered frankly.

"All of it?" his eyebrows furrowed. "Including the pallets, batteries and the electric cables?"

"Not all of it," I corrected. "I chucked the pallets by the dumpster."

"Are all of them in bad condition?" he probed.

"I don't know..."

"So, you trashed all of the items without even bother to check its condition, good or not?" Nick's voice rose in agitation, untying the knot in the first trash bag. "Do you know how much they are worth?"

"You didn't tell me that I should keep the good ones."

"Where's your brain, dude?!" he snapped, pulling out the first trash bag from the bin and placed it onto the floor. He beckoned me to come closer while pointing at the car battery inside the bag. "This is not how you dispose car batteries. Do you know how hazardous they are, especially the leaking ones? If EA finds out, you're fucked!"

"I didn't know," I defended, feeling a sudden heat creeping at the tip of my ears.

"Take all of the batteries and cables out and put them aside," he ordered. "And I need you to wash the truck out there after lunch. We need to have it ready for tomorrow's delivery."

"Can we just send them to the car wash instead?"

"Again, you asked too many questions!" Nick fumed.

My first day of work was exhausting and frustrating, I felt that Nick was doing it deliberately to test my breaking point. After washing the truck, I was assigned to wash the toilet too which was definitely not part of my job. I bet the janitor died too.

              ✨🌟🍀⭐✨🌟🍀⭐

Clients' consignments came in the next morning as planned. Nick's warehouse team and I unloaded all 26 boxes into the warehouse before the truck left the facility to collect more consignments. Consignments arrived were in standard midi and maxi boxes while some were odd item parcels such as surfboard and motorcycle parts that weren't fit enough to be inside the designated boxes.

We arranged and clustered the consignments into regional zones i.e. Middle East, Asia, Australia and so forth, based on recipients' addresses before labelling them. After that, we stacked them up on their respective pallets and secured them with jute ropes.

We arranged the pallets as per Nick's coordination and direction. At first, he directed us to move the Asian batch into the middle of the warehouse while the Middle Eastern batch stayed nearby the entrance. Then he changed his mind, anticipated incoming orders from Europe to arrive by noon. So, he instructed us to move the Asian batch further in, and then shifted the Middle Eastern batch to the middle.

We shuffled around left to right with the pallet jack, obeying his order until I began to question the integrity of his leadership. My breath constricted by the cold morning air wafting into the property, but I tried my best to refrain from asking questions.

But when he instructed us to break up Asian batch into Central and South-East, that was when I lost it and snapped at him, "Are you having fun screwing us around!?"