Chapter 10: Paper Towels (5/5)

Welcome to New Hampshire

May 11, 2022

Now the supply lines are starting to disrupt and things, logistically speaking, are becoming very difficult.

Being in Boston we get trucks from two different warehouses in two different states: one in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and one in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Guess which state’s supply line is the first to get blown to smithereens?

Pennsylvania’s Executive Branch is full of total maniacs. I know because my (ex-)wife was from there, and we were always going back for every holiday known to mankind so I had time to read the newspaper (which her mother would destroy while reading, scattering the leafs of paper all across the floor).

There was a substantial rumor, for example, that their insane Governor, Tom Wolf (who has a PhD in Poly-Sci from MIT) was a secret Muslim (and I would come to believe it). The DA of Philadelphia was turning a great American city into a murderous hellscape.

And of course they had the famously obese and cross-dressing Jewish Masshole Richard Levine as, indeed, their health minister. (It would later come out that Levine packed elderly into rest/death homes while keeping his own mom in a luxury hotel. Pretty sick stuff.)

Also, there were experiments at University of Pittsburg where they aborted babies just so they could graft their baby scalps onto mice… Needless to say, Pennsylvania is a TOTAL MESS THESE DAYS.

So, what I’m getting at is that our shipping, fill-rates and communication with the Pennsylvania warehouse goes totally sideways. People are calling in “sick,” being paid not to work, etc., so the warehouse cannot fill the order, if they even have the product. Then, if they even do that, they have to hire private shipping companies to get the product out.

This week was the first time in the “pandemic” that our regular truck didn’t show up on Tuesday. We didn’t know where it was, and we couldn’t get an answer on anything.

Here they are arriving on Friday at 5pm… That is the bar that closed on St. Patrick’s (never to reopen).

We don’t have a loading dock, and so, our truck ended up showing up on Friday after 5pm. This is a nightmare… as all the single-Millennial-coder-drunks were just starting* to go back on the town (to talk about the latest awful and decrepit Netflix show they’re binge-watching).

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So we had to navigate this crowd with a palette jack, which was poorly stacked at the warehouse (of course), and, well… we must have made quite the sight.

Fun tale: My ex and I once went on a vacation to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (not really sure why), and we booked a room at what appeared to be a decent riverside hotel and restaurant. People were very friendly and an older couple took a liking to my (relatively) young wife and all. Turns out they were swingers and we had (unknowingly?) booked a room at a HOTEL FOR SWINGERS.

Fortunately, we have a warehouse in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire is probably the reddest and most conservative state in the country. Why? That’s an interesting story, so let’s have a political side-bar:

According to the constitution, a legislature has to stick to severe rules of representation. You’re only supposed to have one rep for every 24,000 (?) people. New Hampshire has always stuck to those rules and other rules like: They don’t pay their reps, and they only go to the capital a few times a year. So their reps are not career politicians but doctors, gun store owners, racetrack operators, etc. So imagine being one of these people and going home and telling your 24,000 friends you voted to raise their taxes or, say, restrict their gun rights.

Fat chance.

In fact: New Hampshire has more state reps than California.

So of course they’ve not really locked down at all. Bostonians with the resources and, in some cases, property, go there on the weekend or left town completely weeks ago. I had a regular come in and I say “Where have you been” and she says “I got the hell out of here and have been living with some family up in New Hampshire.”

SMILFs: God bless them.

Another funny thing is we started to run out of propane. It wasn’t quite BBQ season yet so I thought it was odd, but we’d routinely have two dudes ask for propane and finally I caved: “What’s the propane for?” “The weed shops banned flower so all we can get is resin.”

Sure enough I found out that, because of the disease hoax, the weed shops all banned flower. Because that makes sense.

*As we’ll find out later, there is a very “based” (ie, conservative), restaurant group that dominates South Boston. They are huge Trump fans (like me) and they are determined to survive this nonsense. Their four absolutely massive restaurants have just started to re-seat customers.

(Six feet apart of course).