A Dock Worker (DW) is walking around the docks, which are quiet.
‘Hey you!’
‘Yeh you!’
DW turns around. He sees the faces of a Burly Mafioso (BM) and a Slight But Wiry With A Menacing Disposition Mafioso (SBWWAMDM). They are crouched low, their heads poking out, side by side of each other, out from behind the corner of a brick wall.
‘Uuuuuuuuuyyuhhhhhh, what do you want?’ Says DW
‘Give us some of that stuff from the docks, please!’ Said SBWWAMDM, threateningly.
‘And do it quick, or you’ll feel the wrath of the long arm of my long arms!’ growled BM.
DW looked around, bemused and affronted. ‘Guys, are you sure you’re in the right place? Take a look around...’, his arms point out to both sides.
The Mafiosos look around for a moment and scowl. ‘Of course there’s stuff we can have, we are the docks you fool, that’s where everything comes into the city! Cigarettes, food, consumer durables, don’t kid me, kid, my Family have been pulling stunts like this for years, it’s the bread and butter of our criminal enterprise.’ Said SBWWAMDM, in one really long run on sentence.
‘Yeh exactly, now get the stuff!’ BM growled.
‘Unnmmmmmmmmmm Hello! Have you not followed *any* of the logistical innovations of the late 20th century! Ports have worked completely differently ever since Malcolm McLean invented the shipping container in 1956.’ scoffed DW.
SBWWAMDM and BM glared in tandem, knitting their eyebrows so that they formed a thick black zigzag across their two heads.
DW had one hand on his hip now. ‘This port isn’t even operational anymore. I don’t even work here anymore! I was laid off 26 years ago - it’s just force of habit that keeps me coming down here twice a day to look for dealporter work. The actual port is across the bay, at the smaller city with less urban sprawl, which better supports a variety of transport links, like rail & road, to take away the multimodal containers. This helps to move sea cargo into the wider transport system with less delay. Not to mention the price per m2 of inner city land, and the growth in size of container ports to accomodate the cranes and the increased size of boats. A modern container port could never fit here!’
SBWWAMDM and BM heavy and hairy jaws fell open, revealing knubby teeth and pointy, hairy tongues.
DW’s smirk was emphatic and oozed confidence, in the form of drool. ‘Even if there was a port here, no one would be able to get you any stuff. It’s not like the old days, when all the cargo was handballed on and off of the ship in their individual packaging, which allowed ample opportunity for foul play. They’re all contained now in 20 or 40 foot long locked steel containers, moved only by cranes, only touched by humans to lash or unlash them to the ship or their ongoing vehicle. As well as making loading and unloading en mass more efficient, it became more resistant to crime as well.’
SBWWAMDM and BM’s knees began to knock, to the rhythm Tony Allen laid down on Fela Kuti & Africa 70’s 1975 single ‘Expensive Shit’.
DW by now was doing The Worm with such gusto that the concrete quayside was beginning to crumble, cracks spidering out from the spot directly under his erect penis, which was acting as the drill tip to his fleshy pneumatic jackhammer action. ‘Have I even mentioned the extensive system of tracking, surveillance, and labelling, made possible initially by the invention of the barcode in 1949, and continued forth into fully numerised organisation of containers, all processed through computerised systems in which cargo is expected, signed off, and accounted for at every part of its journey? It’s watertight, boys, there’s no way in’ he spluttered.
SBWWAMDM and BM had devolved back into a nutrient rich primordial soup, surrounded by their leather jackets, which stubbornly refusing to melt like the rest of their clothes due to its vinyl coating. They were so thoroughly embarrassed by missing so much of the developments in the operations of material flows, so behind the times on the workings of capital - which their whole culture and way of life was organised to intersect, using carefully chosen displays of violence and secret bribery in order to skim cash from other processes of wealth accumulation - that they had seen no option but to liquidate their corporeal bodies entirely. Returning to a base material, totally unstructured molecules, gave them the possibility to be an entirely new form of life, since they had so clearly failed at every aspect of the role their previous consciousness and physical frame was oriented to fulfil.
DW had thoroughly exorcised the demons of his own cultural and working history, the pain caused by his own obsolescence, by translating it into incredibly virile smarm. The ecstasy this caused in him could not be born by the watery human body, and he became chemically unstable, bonding with the concrete dock and reaching a state of post-sentient crystalline enlightenment that even Graham Harman and the Buddha couldn’t have speculated. He was later dug up in the construction of a mix-used apartment development, to be replaced by the foundations for a Black Sheep Coffee location. But he didn’t mind that too much.