Fourteen Years of Stacking Pallets Ruined My Game Shelf

Every box on my shelf gets measured before it gets a spot, footprint first, height second, and only after that does it get filed anywhere close to alphabetical, and I know exactly how that sounds because my wife has told me how it sounds more than once.

Here’s the thing though, I’ve spent fourteen years now doing inventory and logistics at a warehouse outside Louisville, and what that job actually is, underneath the title, is deciding where things live so a person who has never seen the building before can walk in and find them in under a minute. Zone codes, cycle counts, pick paths laid out so nobody’s crossing the same aisle four times for one order. You’d think that kind of thing stays at the job. It does not stay at the job. I came home one Tuesday a few years back, looked at my game shelf, actually looked at it for the first time in months, and felt something close to physical discomfort at how badly it was organized. Fantasy Flight box next to a two dollar thrift find next to something with a busted corner leaning against a book that had no business being on that shelf at all.

So I fixed it the only way I know how to fix anything, which is the warehouse way. Footprint first, because a Gloomhaven-sized box wedged between two thin ones is how you get crushed corners and I have paid the crushed-corner tax more than once. Height second, so the sightline reads clean instead of jagged. Only after that does anything get to be alphabetical, and even then I’ve got exceptions carved out for anything from the same publisher’s line because those actually look better shelved together regardless of title.

My wife thinks this is funny in the specific way she thinks most of my collecting habits are funny, which is to say she teases me about it and then also benefits from being able to find the thing she wants in four seconds instead of watching me hunt for ten minutes. I’ve caught her doing the footprint sort herself once or twice when she’s the one putting something away, which she will deny if you ask her directly.

What gets me is that at the actual warehouse, nobody notices good inventory work. That’s the whole point of it, it’s supposed to be invisible, things are just where they’re supposed to be and nobody thinks about the system underneath that making it true. My shelf is the opposite of invisible, it’s the first thing anyone comments on when they come over, half of them think it’s a little much and the other half immediately start asking where I got specific games. I don’t think I set out to bring the job home. I think it just turns out that once you spend forty hours a week getting genuinely good at a very specific, very unglamorous skill, you stop being able to look at a mess anywhere in your life and not itch to fix it, whether anyone’s paying you for that fix or not.

I did the actual cataloging properly this month too, wrote down what I actually own instead of just knowing roughly where everything was by feel, and found four things I’d forgotten I had wedged into the back row. One of them was a game I’d been meaning to review for a year. So there’s at least one upside to the obsession beyond a shelf that looks nice.