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7:50 p.m. - 2004-08-21 Pallets Cats I Have Known..Part III (again)Ok...where was I...no more ranting and raving. I'll have to make this a quickie as I meant to get out in that garage all day and kept getting side tracked...not enough hours in the day. The next tale here will start off about the ferral cats that we never call pets but somehow come in to live in the stacks of pallets for a while and we let them stay because they hunt mice. Eventually they get loaded by forklift onto a truck and take a ride to another universe and we never see them again. If you have never seen the warehouse area of a pallet company, I'll clue you in. It is a giant warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with pallets...sometimes 20 high or even taller. When we have a large supply, the warehouse gets so jammed up that making your way from front to back is like a maze....really..you can get lost. This environment is a kitty wonderland or should I say it is like a kitty condo city. Each pallet has a 4 or 5 inch space between the top and bottom deck boards, perfect for kitty hiding places. They can literally live in between stacks of pallets and go from one stack to the other.....from the front of the warehouse to the back without being seen. Cat behavior dictates that when they get frightened, they hunker down and hide and keep still, even when their kitty condo is...well...moving. This is how they get loaded onto trucks without our knowing it. At some point in time they exit the stack and they are in our customer's warehouse or they jump out at some unsuspecting dock worker when the poor fellow opens the trailer that we drop in a yard somewhere. It is something like a time warp for cats. They are in one place and suddenly they are across the universe. Sometimes mother cats will have kittens in the stacks. Usually, by the time we find them they are already mean and unapproachable. One time we loaded 3 kittens unknowingly onto a trailer and took it to the Azteca Food plant where they make Tortilla Chips. Azteca has an indoor dock and our trucks have to back right into their buildings to unload. This is part of their stringent health proceedures designed to keep debris out of the plant and out of the food. Well...one day, we loaded some of these kitty condos onto a trailer and backed into Azteca and SWOOSH.....out ran 3 mean little kitties right into the food production part of the plant. Everyone in the plant was running after them trying to catch them and I guess it took several hours. Since cats shed hair and they are under stringent health requirements...the volume of food that had to be thrown away could have fed an army and the entire operation had to be sterilized. Needless to say, Azteca won't talk to us anymore. We were lucky they didn't sue. To set you up for the next installation of "Pallet Cats I Have Known...Part IV"....I will start off explaining that one major difference in warehouse pallets is that some are 2 way pallets and some are 4 way pallets. 2 ways only have the natural openings and 4 ways have notches cut in the sides so that a forklift can access them from any of the 4 sides. The 4 ways are also heavier duty and they are the ones our company really makes money on....We love 4 way pallets...so we named our next pet cat.....you guessed it....."4 way". Will tell you about him tomorrow. P. I. Yarnsmith
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