Nothing in the world could’ve prepared Evelyn for the chaos she would be engulfed by, stepping through the security gates and into the documentation room of the greenhouse building. Upon entering the room, pure, unadulterated chaos flooded her subconscious brain before she had even realized what exactly was going on. She first noticed two workers violently slamming open cabinets in a mad search for something, then she heard the despairing screams emanating from the large greenhouse just adjacent to the room she was in. Finally, she noticed an older guy, probably in his 40’s, just scrolling on his phone, seemingly oblivious to all of the panic.
Not wanting to bother the two crazed workers near the cabinets, she approached the older guy. “Hey, umm. What happened here? Everyone’s in a frenzy.”
“An hour ago, Dominic found a couple potatoes with white fuzz in the central blocks near the far side. Then– get this– they found brown spots on leaves covering the whole twenty blocks of potato crops– just fan-fucking-tastic. Since then, everyone’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Oh my god, our boss is going to be so mad.”
“Well not if they somehow find a solution today, before boss arrives tomorrow morning— Pfffftt, it would take a real miracle for that to happen.”
“Okay, that’s not helpful.” she started waving her hands back and forth. “Wooohhh,” okay.” “What are you doing here, not helping out?”
“What do you want me to do? This wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t assigned to look after the potato crops. Now just let me take my break in peace, damn. Argghh!” his jaw clenched, his lips hardened into a sour frown, and his brows slanted into a tight, angry V-shape. His hands curled into fists for a few seconds, before he scooted his chair back into the table and returned to his phone.
Evelyn sighed, then realized she forgot to swipe her ID card on the scanner on the wall to clock in for the day. After doing so, she saw a list of tasks pop up on her phone, but as she skimmed over them, she turned off her phone and decided to ignore her personal tasks, at least for now. By this point, the two workers by the cabinets had left the room– so she put her lunchbox in the fridge and then frantically, but lightly, jogged to the room’s exit door and entered the gigantic greenhouse space.
What she saw inside was a mess of workers running around back and forth from crop block to crop block. A pair of workers had just run straight out of the Tool Room, carrying wrenches and black trash bags, and now were walking to the potatoes crop section in the far back of the greenhouse. Evelyn sprinted over there, being careful not to trip over any cables.
When she arrived at the crop bed where a couple workers were at, she asked “How can I help?”. A guy with a clean-fade mohawk and a light mustache turned around, and with a hose in his right hand, answered, “You see that other bed of potatoes in front of you? You can go over to that bed, and start draining the water like I’m doing here. We think the fungus lives in the water so we need to fully drain out all of it.”
“Okay, thanks.” she took a few steps, but then turned around again. “Where are the hoses again? In the Tool Room?”
“Uh huh, yes. I think I saw at least one more hose in the back, on the lower shelf.”
“Thanks,” she said quickly and then she hurried over to the Tool Room, and grabbed a hose. Then, she jogged over to the unattended crop block behind the one currently being drained, and then scanned the area on the outside wall of the water reservoir for any types of valves. She spotted a red valve under the water reservoir, attached to a white pipe that went up into the water reservoir. She twisted the cap off the red valve, exposing an open small pipe attached to the big white pipe. Then, she sleeved the receiving end of the hose onto the end of the pipe, and tightly fastened it on there. She grabbed the front end of the hose off of the floor with both hands, dragged it over to the commercial bathroom, and then put the front nozzle of the hose in between the slits of the giant drain on the floor of the bathroom.
She rushed back over to her crop bed, kneeled down to get a good reach under the reservoir, and turned the red valve fully counter-clockwise to release the pressure. Immediately, she heard a light trickle and when she stood up, she saw the water level of the mucky water inside the reservoir gradually going down.
[ XYZ]
[Evelyn and the other guy who was draining the dirty water, Andrés, have just drained all of the water from their 2 crop blocks. Now, they need to use gloves to move the infected potato crops from the crop blocks into black plastic trash bags.]
Evelyn ran straight back to the Tools Room, where she grabbed gloves and immediately put them on. She looked for trash bags among the mess of tools in the room, but to no avail, and so she gave up. But fortunately on her way back to her block, she noticed two empty trash bags lying flat on the floor next to the feet of the same mustached guy she had talked to earlier.
The guy was lifting up the crops out of his empty reservoir with his right hand and depositing them in a trash bag that he held in his left hand. She walked over to him, and asked “Hey, can I take one of your trash bags? I’m about to put the infected crops into the trash.”
He didn’t take time to stop his activity or look at Evelyn, but he responded, “Sure, but just take one please. I might end up needing another one.”
Evelyn grabbed a trash bag off the floor, then walked back to her block, which was very close by. She saw the array of plants in her block– their leaves covered with small brown spots– and realized that this task would take her a while. She took a deep breath, opened up the trash bag, and then started taking plants out of their holes and putting them into her trash bag, starting with the plant in the top-left corner of the crop bed. She kept at it until her trash bag was full and heavy. Still one-third more of the crops left to go, she thought.
Then she walked over to the guy, and asked, “Do you know where the other trash bags are? I’m gonna need one more.”
“Tabitha and Clara took a lot of them, and I got my trash bags from them. I’m sure they would know where they got them from,” he answered.
“Those are Tabitha and Clara, right?” she pointed at the two figures a couple blocks in front of them.
“Yea,” he said.
“Okay, thanks,” she said.
Then she hurried over to Tabitha and Clara. “Hey y’all, do you have any spare trash bags? I need one.” One of them, wearing glasses, turned over from the crop bed to face Evelyn. Oh, these were the people who were searching through the cabinets earlier. How did I not know their names?.
“Yea, we have a couple more, so you should be able to take one. They’re sitting on the ground next to the side of the table.” Tabitha/Clara said.
“Thank you so much,” Evelyn said, and then grabbed one from their pile.
Evelyn rushed back to her own crop bed, trash bag in hand. Okay, just one more time, she told herself. Then she plucked the crops one by one from the water bed, this time going faster because she had gotten used to the repetitive motion.
When she had finished depositing the last of the infected crops into her second trash bag, she took a breather and looked out at the vast expanse of green crops– presumably all healthy– in the greenhouse. [Maybe, I can add a couple more sentences which show that she is taking a decent amount of time to relax and breathe. She’s taking 1 or 2 minutes to breathe, not just a couple seconds, and I need to suggest to the reader that she’s taking a 2-minutes break instead of a couple-seconds-long break.] She could see Tabitha, Clara, and the other guy tirelessly lifting plants up and into their trash bags– not even pausing for a second. Why do I feel so tired? The other people seem to be really giving it their all, she thought to herself. Then, she suddenly started involuntarily taking deep breaths, her vision starting to darken and blur. Suddenly, her legs turned into jelly and supporting her body felt more like doing a hard curl-up at the gym than something automatic. Her knees buckled, and she fell on them to the ground. Just as her upper body started falling forwards onto the ground, she thrusted her arms forward to catch herself.
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I need some fucking water, she thought. She opened her eyes, put both her hands flat against the floor, and pushed up with all of her strength. Then, she limped over from her crop block to the tool room door. When she passed by that guy from earlier, she considered asking him for some help, but didn’t want to interrupt him and his work. Two minutes later, she had made it to the water fountain by the tool room door. At the water fountain, she desperately drank as much water as she could, stopping every few seconds to breathe.
After drinking the water, her fatigue lessened and she became a lot more conscious. She took a peep at the greenhouse in front of her– the two women, the mustached guy from earlier, and a couple other workers were standing in a circle, near the back wall of the greenhouse.
She walked over to the group, asked “What do we do now?”.
“We were just talking about that, kinda. We’re probably gonna plant some new potato seeds in the crop beds we emptied.” the mustached guy said.
“Shouldn’t we ask the supervisor what to do? I heard the company’s seeds are valuable, and we can’t just use some of them all willy-nilly.” Evelyn inquired.
The guy face looked puzzled, a bit annoyed. “I mean, what else are we supposed to do? Also that supervisor guy is not going to be happy about this. We should keep it hidden and hope they never find out about it.”
“It’s a big greenhouse, not like the lone supervisor they have is going to notice a couple of blocks of crops that are a bit less grown than the others,” one of the two women from earlier added.
“Wait, are you Tabitha? Nice to meet you.” Evelyn said.
“I’m Clara,” the woman said.
“Okay,” Evelyn gulped. “But if the supervisor finds out about this, I’m playing dumb. I won’t actively go out of my way to tell them it was your idea, but I sure as hell am not going down because of some silly thing like this.”
“Calm down, okay?” the man said.
Evelyn wanted to clap back at him but she was still very tired, and a big part of her just wanted this mess of a situation to be over as soon as possible, so she kept quiet and listened to the group.
“So someone’s gonna have to create a huge nutrient solution in the mixing tank” Clara announced.
A curly-and-brunette-haired man– not the mustached man– volunteered for the job: “I can help with that,” he offered.
“Good,” Clara said. “The mixing tank is over there in the corner, that giant rectangular box made of blue plastic,” she pointed to the mixing tank. “Nutrient solutions are in the room right next to it. There should be a valve that you can turn to add in the water, but I’m not sure.”
“I can be the other person to help him with pouring the nutrients into the tank” the mustached man said.
“Okay, that works out. Now, I guess the rest of us go get seeds and plant them into the empty holes. Sound good everyone?” Clara said, looking to see that everyone was in approval.
“Okay, let’s do it!” said the mustached man enthusiastically. Then each person broke off from the group to do their own respective tasks.
Evelyn, Clara, Tabitha, and two men Evelyn had seen before– but couldn’t recall the names of– walked over to the seed room near the left side of the back wall of the greenhouse. Clara opened the door and held it open for the others to walk inside.
Once inside, the taller man opened the fridge and started handing glass jars full of potato seeds to each of the other people. After all five people were holding one glass jar of seeds, he closed the fridge shut.
“We might need two more,” Clara said. “When I got here in the morning, I counted 5 beds of infected potato crops. Each bed has one hundred and forty holes for about one hundred and forty seeds, so we need seven hundred seeds total. Each of these jars has about one hundred potato seeds, and right now we only have five jars out of the fridge.”.
“Good math. Thanks for pointing that out,” the taller man complimented her, put down his single jar on the countertop, and grabbed two more jars of potato seeds from the fridge, placing them on the countertop. Tabitha and the shorter man each grabbed another jar from the counter.
“Where’s the starter medium?” Evelyn asked.
“I think it’s in the upper cabinet over there. A big bag of brown, almost soil-like stuff– coco something.” the taller man informed.
Evelyn opened the cabinet the man had pointed to, and grabbed one of the large bags of Verdec-brand coco coir. Then the taller man and Clara each grabbed a bag for themselves.
“Okay, I think we’re good to go,” Clara said.
“Who’s going where?” Tabitha asked.
“Oh, umm, you can probably just go to the bed that you were emptying out earlier today.”
“Okay,” Tabitha responded.
Then they all headed out of the seed room: Clara and Tabitha walked together to their beds, the taller man and younger man to their beds, and Evelyn walked by herself over to her crop bed and set down her jar on the ground so it wouldn’t accidentally fall over and shatter.
She opened the bag of coco coir. Shit, it’s a very fine and loose soil. Why did I think I could use my gloves to pick it up? she thought to herself. Then she walked back to the tools room, grabbed a small hand shovel and returned to her crop bed.
Shovel in hand, she scooped out a small amount of coco coir and slid it down into one of the holes in the grid in her crop bed, then used the dull bottom side of her shovel to pack down the dirt. Then, still with gloves on, she picked up a potato seed from the jar on the ground and nudged it slightly into the pile of dirt. One done, ninety-nine left to go, she thought.
She repeated the process for the rest of the holes in the crop bed, caring less and less about pieces of dirt accidentally spilt onto the tray the more holes she planted. By the end, all one hundred holes were filled, but there was also a thin layer of dirt on the tray itself.
Evelyn was going to go grab a paper towel from the Tools Room, but then she stopped herself and checked the large clock on the wall– It’s already ten til three, they could hire some more people if they really wanted their crop bed trays to look clean and polished, she thought.
Evelyn put her almost-empty bag of coco coir and her fully-empty jar of seeds back into the Seed Room, then returned her shovel to the Tools Room. She took a glance at the other workers across the greenhouse– They’re still planting their seeds, but they must be almost done. Oh, and the two guys seem to still be working on preparing the nutrient solution for the seeds we just planted. I can take a break now.
She walked over to the lounge room. Inside there were two workers she didn’t exactly recognize, chatting with each other, and also the guy from earlier, Mike, was also there. He couldn’t have just, sat there all day, right? she thought. She grabbed her lunchbox from the fridge and took a chair at one of the unoccupied tables.
Even though she had eaten very little for breakfast and so was hungry by this time in the afternoon, her lunch looked pretty unappetizing: crackers, a small can of moist tuna, and a can of beans.
She first got up and drank some water from the water fountain to ease her stomach. Then, she opened the beans with a public kitchen can opener, and ate them with a spoon she had brought from home. By the time she had finished the beans, though, she was still feeling queasy about the crackers and tuna, so she closed her lunchbox.
She got on her phone, opened up the Chime app, and watched some funny short-form videos. Five minutes later, Clara and the others opened up the lounge door. Evelyn looked up from her phone and asked, “You’re done with planting the seeds, right?”
Clara nodded affirmatively, “Yes, we just finished.”
“What about the guys on the mixing tank? Are they done yet?” Evelyn asked.
“I asked them, they said they’re almost done mixing the nutrients in with the fresh water. They said they can distribute the water to the beds we planted seeds in,”
“Oh, okay, that’s a relief.” Evelyn replied.
“Yea, God bless them,” Tabitha said.
“So, what now? How are we gonna finish our own individual tasks by end of shift when we spent more than half the day on this?” Evelyn raised the question.
“Uhm, honestly, I don’t know,” Clara admitted.
[ The five people: Evelyn, Clara, Tabitha, and the two men talk about some non-work topics briefly over their 25-minute break]
[ For the rest of Evelyn’s shift, Evelyn finishes the tasks assigned to her. Every now and then, she looks at the tasklist on her phone to see what tasks she still has left to do
By the way, the tasklist is shown on the company’s iPhone app, because the company computes this tasklist for Evelyn, every day that she clocks in for work.
Evelyn did NOT create the tasklist herself.
]