I Got Drunk At The Staff Party And Reorganised The Warehouse

The party was in the canteen, which is thirty metres from the warehouse, and somebody had propped the fire door.

I had been complaining about the warehouse layout for eleven months. It was organised by supplier, which is how it had been done since 1998, and which meant that to pick one standard order you walked, I had measured this, four hundred and ten metres.

At approximately half past eleven at night, full of company lager and personal conviction, I went in and fixed it.

I worked, apparently, for four hours. I have no memory of hours two and three.

I moved product by pick frequency. Fast movers by the doors, slow movers deep. I made aisle labels out of gaffer tape and a marker pen. I wrote a key. The key is, and I say this with the humility of a man who was extremely drunk, actually very good.

I also, at some point, drank a Red Bull I found in someone's locker, which I have since replaced with a case, and which is the crime I feel worst about.

Monday morning: chaos. Genuine, shouting chaos. Nobody could find anything. Two lorries went out late. My supervisor said my name in a way that made a forklift driver stop and watch.

Then the ops manager — Derek's equivalent, a woman named Fran who has been there twenty-six years and has never once raised her voice — walked the whole thing with a clipboard for about forty minutes.

She came back and said: "Whose is this?"

I said mine. I was, I think, resigning as I said it.

She said, "Pick times are down eighteen per cent. Get me the key."

We kept it.

They put the layout into the system. There is a laminated version of my gaffer-tape key on the wall by the door, typed up, in the company font, with a little logo.

I did not get a bonus. I got a mention in the newsletter that described the change as "a team initiative", and I got Fran, at the next Christmas party, standing next to me at the bar and saying, into her drink, without looking at me: "Don't do it again."

I have not. I have thought about it.