Category Archives: Work

Stay gold, Nachoclaws.

Posted on by

All human life is spent trying not to fail at any more things. Reassuringly, nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. So even she fails, and we get seasons. Failing can take infinite forms: burning food, hurting yourself, and letting everyone down. Generally, barfing is a sure sign of failure. You take a risk, you fail, and puke comes out. When walking into the boulders, hikers ask about our crash pads. With bright eyes we explain that they are for rock climbing, and they say, “Oh, in case you fall, I get it!” But there’s no “in case.” It’s inevitable, climbing is falling. I should say, “They are for falling off rocks.” Maybe you can’t identify with any of this because you’re not a walking train wreck, you have a shiny golden face, and all your wheelies are eternal, but you have definitely failed at something, and will most definitely fail at something else again. read more

Live Every Week Like It’s BIKE WEEK

Posted on by

As it turns out, a good way to make dreams come true (or at least make your life change) is to just start typing things you like into the jobs section of Craigslist. For example, a floor stain like myself might try such search terms as: frozen burrito, roadkill, or my own muscles. Sparkling with a childlike optimism rarely glimpsed in our fair Eli, he entered motorcycle into the search bar, and forever changed the course of The Rampage. In fact, he derailed it temporarily and the trailer is sitting vacant (hopefully including mice) at our friends’ house outside of Reno for the next 5 months while we roll around the East Coast living out of hotels and working a demo tour of Can-Am Spyders. read more

Water Spiders Don’t Make It Rain

Posted on by

An eerie blue light appears on the early morning horizon, and eight legs twitch with anticipation. The Water Spider is captivated by the glow and changes course. A woman with white hair has illuminated the beacon and she stands under it holding a dildo the size of 3 eggplants. She whacks the supple mass on a baker cart, and as the impact reverberates through its realistic flesh, she dispassionately wonders, “What do people even do with this thing?”

My job as Water Spider is to bring the woman with the white hair more black plastic to wrap her thousands of sex toys in, because she has exhausted her supply. There are others like her, selflessly black-wrapping fist-shaped butt plugs in order to protect the modest, heaving buckets of protein powder from a conveyor onto a cart, feverishly separating hundreds of similar shades of eyeshadows into perfect rows, all chasing arbitrary productivity goals set by the managers. The Water Spider speed-walks about a marathon by the end of the day while dodging Tokyo-drifting forklifts, keeping the area in order, and making sure everyone has what they need to do their job. The Fernley warehouse is one of the “legacy” (oldest) facilities, and is almost completely devoid of robots. Conveyors snake around much of the airspace, which gives the facility its warehouse feel, but almost all of the work is done by humans holding scanners. read more