Of all of us on day one, I brought the operational experience to Amplifier. You see, after my freshman year of college, I had spent the summer working at Hydraulic Supply Company in South Florida [the location off the Sawgrass Expressway]. I specialized in packing hoses, pumps, fittings, and other hydraulic supplies. When it came time to make a box and put an order’s contents into the box, I made the box and put the contents of a bin into said box. I then sent it along the line to be scanned, labeled, and closed. On the one hand, I don’t remember the specifics. On the other hand, there were not a lot of specifics.

So, when we decided at Amplifier that we were ready to start doing things with stuff, I was like, “we need to get a pallet jack.” In retrospect, the correct order of operations is 1. get a warehouse 2. get a pallet jack. But, as I mentioned last post, Gibson had a set of double doors that could accommodate a pallet and a big room on the first floor, so who needs a warehouse. I didn’t know how one went about getting a pallet jack, so I poked around on WebCrawler and came across the phrase “Materials Handling”, and that was the jackpot. Once I learned the industry term, I found Global Industrial and ordered a pallet jack. And it came with a catalog that had everything I could think of that might belong in a warehouse, and hundreds of pages of additional stuff I’d never before considered.

It was a narrow pallet jack. I have no recollection why I ordered a narrow pallet jack. My best guess is that I measured the standard doorway at Gibson and got a jack that would fit those doors. Unfortunately, the pallets weren’t correspondingly narrow, so our pallet storage was limited to the big room.  The big room was maybe the size of a McDonald’s dining room with a hallway and smaller rooms wrapping around it. On the second floor where we had some offices and the call center we were setting up. It was coming together.