Judy Lynch is driving a forklift, and I am trotting behind her. A plastic stopwatch hangs from my neck on a lanyard, and I am carrying a clipboard, from which I have wiped several years of warehouse dust. The dust, black and sticky, consists mostly of tread particles from solid-rubber forklift wheels. It lies a quarter-inch thick on the concrete. Lynch leaves a furrow as she drives.
She asks whether she needs to slow down for me. I assure her that she needs to drive as fast as she always does; I am timing her drive. When she stops, I will note it on my clipboard. And at the end of the week the data on my clipboard will change her job and possibly cost her two employees. Lynch, then, has reason to be suspicious, but she is not. She tells me I remind her of her former brother-in-law. This is a good thing, she says.
