Screwing Boxes

Never occurred to me that simply working with cardboard boxes could be so exhausting. Tired and sore, D, A, and myself, comparing notes over a beer at the pub. We're all whipped. Several reasons, we walked miles for one thing, for another, we carried three boxes at a time to the central area, where we did the actually screwing, no handles or hand-holes so you had to use compression with the palms of your hands on two sides of the bottom box to carry them, and that used a muscle-group not usually engaged for such an extended period (we worked 8 hours straight except a for quick lunch), and the actual motion, the locking together of the boxes, requires strong use of fingers to get the four 'leaves' of the top box tucked under the leaves of the bottom box. If anyone did this for a living, it would be a short career due to carpal-tunnel syndrome. Then we discovered a mistake we'd made a great many times and had to redo several stacks. Even the 'stackers', the boxes in the middle of both the posts and the lintels have an up and down if you're interested in aligning the corner overlap, where cardboard is overlapped for the only side-seam in your basic cardboard box. Late in the day, working on the last lintels for which we had boxes, and getting longer, 8,9,10,13 boxes, we found a very interesting way to build them horizontally. We set up two eight foot tables end to end. Requires three people, one on either side guiding the leaves with strong fingers, we call these two 'The Sidemen' and then there's the third guy, at the outer end, balancing the new box lightly in his hands, so the sidemen can interleave the tabs, we call him the 'Screwer' or sometimes just Screw which is what one of the sidemen would whisper when the time was right. The perk to this incredibly boring day of screwing boxes, was that the three of us worked very well together. It wasn't quite fun, but it wasn't awful, and we got a huge amount done, which was critical, because the artist will be there tomorrow and we need to install this. Sorry Linda, but the talent is so often a pain in the ass. Not you, I cherish the moments I spend with you, but talent is almost always arrogant, because it is accurately tangent. Hey, I merely report what I see. That and this. I felt a part of a team, this afternoon, we were screwing boxes. Say what those critics might, we were on our speed. No one assembles boxes better. I can't believe I'm cut such slack: you'd thought I'd say something or would have said something, might have said something. Six artists to install, and the box guy is just one of them. I envision some sleepless nights. Still, nothing I can't do, and I don't have a word of advice.