The spring that I graduated from university I was handed a diploma, crossed the stage and stood there, stunned. I'd been working toward that day for so long, without really thinking beyond it that its arrival felt like the air after a precipice. A heartbeat later I'm standing in a warehouse. It's a new job and every inch of the place seems to scream out to me that I don't belong.

On my first day, Tony is showing me around, patiently explaining the routines. Each man puts on a snowsuit and cap, boots and gloves before launching out on a small motorized truck. You take a list with you on each trip and sail the aisles of a cold warehouse, collecting a dozen cases of frozen orange juice here, frozen pies there. Finally you deposit the load, destined for a grocery store somewhere, and start out on another trip. Sounds simple, but I felt ridiculous, wearing a snowsuit and trying to get the scooter-thing out of the tight parking spot, banging back and forth between another scooter and a pillar. I pictured myself bringing down a part of the ceiling, stressed and sweating it out as Tony waited patiently.

Over the next few months I complain to my friends constantly about how sophisticated little me doesn't fit in at the Warehouse. Much like residence in my first year of school ­ or anytime when you get a lot of men together -- some guys are easygoing and comfortable while the ones with something to prove begin to swagger around. I'm not only new, I'm part-time, another strike against me. In the staff room a full-timer walks slowly towards me, making eye contact and nodding "no." I'm baffled until he tells me I'm in the seat he always gets. They talk sports and I don't speak the language; just throw in a few basic statements when I can, mostly stuff like "yeah." On the job, Tony keeps telling me I'm stacking boxes "like what the fuck." As two men pass each other on scooters, they exchange "Fuck you" with "No, fuck you." I bring cigarettes in order to offer one to Tony. "Cigarettes are a way to bond," my girlfriend tells me.

At a meeting with one of the "suits" the men are accused of purposely slowing down as a way to register dissatisfaction and they explode into anger and swearing. It seems to me that the accusation isn't justified. At the coffee truck the man gives me the change saying "thanks, brother" and I wonder if he does it purposely -- it seems a little forced. Try as I might I can't get myself to call anyone "buddy." One of the truck drivers tells me I'm supposed to get in the cab of his truck so that he can show me "where the stores are." When I refuse he keeps slapping me with loud verbal requests, finally setting a date when I'm supposed to meet him. A few days after I don't show up he's coming after me in the warehouse saying "Hey! Hey buddy! You stood me up, man!" A supervisor later laughs and tells me that he "gets some of the guys running the other way" though I'm not sure what this means, exactly. At the end of one of the days I get a lift home with another part-timer who walks all around his car to check it, then talks about it all the way home. Telling a few of the guys in the locker room about what I took in school, one of them says he's going back to school. "Oh yeah?" I ask, "What are you going to take?" He answers "I'm going to take the inter-course" and there is much laughter and pounding of lockers.

This is a place where the homophobia is out of control. There is not one woman in the place, and you can't bend over to pick something up without somebody saying "You know what he wants!" I suppose a real man picks something up using a piece of gum on a string. An older guy named Stan joins me where I sit alone on a bench outside, and asks me how I'm doing. Stan tells me that he's been there seven years, only enough to have a little of the all-important seniority. He asks me about my interests, what I took in school, assuming I want to go somewhere else. He tells me he wouldn't have spoken that way to the suit if he weren't part of the union. Before long, someone declares "Stan's after one of the young guys!" One of my gay friends narrows her eyes and says "Oooh, it's good you're reminding me there are places like this."

On the TV in the staff room a woman grabs a man's ear and leads him away. "I'd slap any woman that tried to treat me like that!" someone says. When I tell a few of the guys I can't join them for a staff baseball game (played at 8 am after working all night since around 10 or 11 pm), making up the excuse that my girlfriend needs my help, they respond "Don't let the woman rule you!"

I talk about quitting, and friends are supportive but my Mom tells me it's "time to grow up" and face reality. She feels I should work there for the whole summer and then go to college next year. It's nice, she feels, that I graduated university (with a degree as vague as English literature, part of my whole problem), but now I need a skill. After not enjoying the academic world but pushing through, I'm upset that my Mom doesn't understand my desire to find someplace I want to be. As far as I'm concerned I went to school for those years so that I could at least come close to doing something that I want. The job has paid well enough that all my debts are gone. Finally, I'm in my supervisor's office making up the excuse that I find the workload to be too much of a physical strain. Eventually he slowly comments "Maybe you'd...be happier somewhere else, then." He almost seems a little sad. More than once that summer I'd overhear my Mom on the phone, feeling the need to justify to someone that I had quit my job, how I hadn't had a vacation in a while. In the locker room at the end of my last day I'm talking to one of the men who has heard I've quit and he asks "So, this job not good enough for you?" I consider, then say "No, actually it's the other way around."

It wasn't a complete untruth. Although impatient to get to what I believed I "deserved" after finishing school (I'm still waiting), I discovered a respect for the job and some of these men. They do a job nobody else takes care of, and they get very little recognition or respect for it. If nobody was willing to sweep the streets and they became unbearable, would all the lawyers gladly take care of it?

And while I charged through the experience without pausing to consider, the truth was that I was refusing to acknowledge that I'd already started the rest of my life. Mark Twain said "I've never let school interfere with my education." Something I'd failed to understand. After school, the rest of anybody's life involves dropping into one new environment after another, negotiating your way around and finding those people you're comfortable with. In retrospect, the shock of such a different environment was a valuable new experience -- a good way to wake up.