Great news! The warehouse crew won the lottery! Actually, this is terrible news, because they all summarily quit and now there's nobody in the warehouse and Phyllis has a huge order that needs to go out. Andy thinks the pressure's on him to make others fix it, but he's got no idea how bad it's going to get. Because here's the thing: you know how Darryl used to be in the warehouse? He was in the lotto pool with the guys (and Madge), but he dropped out when he got promoted. So obviously he finds himself filled with angst over losing out on what would have been his share of the winnings. Well, angst and tacos, actually, but the issue is that while Andy's trying to push Darryl to get some new warehouse workers hired already, Darryl's not up for it. Or up for anything, for that matter. In fact, he challenges Andy to fire him. Andy's entirely unequipped to deal with that challenge, or to even take it seriously. When he introduces Darryl to the losers he was able to hire on his own, Darryl reveals what's really eating him: getting screwed out of the regional manager position. Shocking a nation, Andy is equipped to handle that, calling Darryl on coasting since Jo promoted him, and making such a convincing case that Darryl concedes the argument and recommits himself to his job and his destiny. Just in time to discover the disaster area that the temporary replacements from the office -- Jim, Dwight, Erin, and Kevin -- have made of his warehouse.
Starting this episode right up with a crisis -- someone left a dog locked in a car in the parking lot. The employees argue about what to do and stress out at each other, but Kevin's the first to come up with an actual plan: "I'm going to get in my car. When I start dying, I will honk the horn three times. That means save the dog." Dwight pours his milkshake into the sunroof and onto the seats to try giving the dog a drink, and after more bickering, Oscar strides up with a tire iron and smashes the back passenger window. "And one for good measure," he adds, smashing a taillight when the others cheer his bold action. [Note: Though no one points out that both the back seat and the pup would now be covered in glass -- RS.] So now what to do with the dog trying to jump out the missing window? Jim says it's Oscar's deal. "You want a dog?" Cut to Oscar punching air holes into the cardboard he duct-taped into the window. Day saved. Well, except for Kevin, unconscious with his face on his steering wheel.
Apparently the warehouse crew won 950 thousand dollars in the lottery and quit yesterday, which puts a lot of pressure on Andy. "I'm the one who has to tell everyone to get back to work," he THs. "I'm the one who has to tell Darryl to hire a new warehouse crew. I'm the one who has to say those things!"
Darryl is happy to get a call from his ex-ex, Justine. From Darryl's end of the call, we can tell she's all excited about the lottery win, until she learns Darryl quit playing with the warehouse crew when he got promoted. Darryl hangs up rather than give her the number of one of the guys who won. He THs, "They won...playing my birthday." In the bullpen, everyone (well, mostly just Pam and Jim) is still talking about what they would do with the money. Kelly THs that she'd still work, for like a dollar a year. "Obviously I wouldn't come in 'til noon, and I wouldn't do anything I didn't want to do. I mean, I'm getting paid a dollar year, okay? You can chill." Andy, frustrated with the lack of working, issues a general threat: if it doesn't get better, he will change his tone, to that of a bad Mr. T impression. "I feel sympathy for the jerks who have to listen to this all day!" Well, at least it's not an empty threat. Andy asks Darryl how staffing the warehouse is going, but Darryl's not really on it until Phyllis and Andy stress at him about important order for a client Phyllis can't afford to lose. Andy calls for volunteers to cover the warehouse, but only Erin raises her hand. "If you guys don't need me up here," she hastens to add. They so don't. Oscar makes noises about chivalry, but claims a bad hip prevents him from joining in himself. Jim says he's in, "as the strongest person in this office." Which of course is only a goad to get Dwight to volunteer, which totally works. Andy calls on Kevin, who resentfully THs, "Good old Kevin, he'll do anything. Well guess what: I will not do a good job." That was almost a joke, right?
Angela drops a clipboard off at Pam's desk, trying to pass it off as a lotto pool sign-up when it's a guess your baby's weight thing. Pam throws it away, saying, "You really think I'm gonna have a 14-pound baby?" You really think you're going to get a loft in New York, Pam, like the one your computer screen is showing?
Andy knocks on Darryl's office door to check on how things are going. Darryl's more concerned about when he got so fat than doing anything with the stack of applications on his desk. He further shares that instead of going out celebrating with the guys last night, he stayed home and ate tacos in his basement. Now his basement smells like tacos. This is seriously like a five-minute soliloquy on Darryl's taco-smelling basement. Andy tries to jumpstart the process by picking an application and waving it in Darryl's unresponsive face until he finally grabs it. Andy acts happy at this sign of life, but back in his office, he THs, "That is not Darryl. I don't know where Darryl is. I suspect, probably, our Darryl is inside of Fat Darryl." Snerk.
Down in the warehouse, Jim says their first order is for 300 boxes. He figures that's 75 boxes a piece, but Dwight boasts, "300 for me, zero for you chumps! Deal with it!" "Nice," Jim says, and then Dwight gets on the forklift and crashes it into the wall. When the forks get stuck in the sheet metal, he hops out, grabs a box, and says, "Yep," avoiding the others' eyes.
Andy and Darryl are standing at the front of a conference room full of warehouse applicants. Andy's shooting for levity but ends up shooting himself in the foot, introducing Darryl as "my other brother Darryl." Andy asks Darryl how this usually goes. "You mean what did we do the last time the warehouse crew won the lottery?" Darryl asks. This is rather interesting news to the applicants, and Andy tries to keep it on track while Darryl digresses about the guys' plans for the money, which include a fat camp, a strip club on a boat and Hide's "energy drink for Asian homosexuals." Andy asks the applicants for the room so he can try to talk Darryl into being less of a downer, "because the more I talk, the more they're gonna realize I don't know what I'm talking about." Darryl says he's in. Andy believes him, but only because the alternative is unthinkable.
Dwight is trying to demonstrate the power of grunting while loading a truck one box at a time. When Erin tries it the box she threw just ends up under the truck. "I didn't feel anything," she says.
The applicants are back, having shamelessly raided the kitchen. Andy turns it over to Darryl, who asks them why they want to work there. He's not satisfied with the "I need a job" answer, and tells them not to take the first job that comes along. "Because thing you know, it's ten years later and you're still there. You could write your obituary tomorrow. It's not going to change." Andy, nervously, "Are we...scaring them straight?" Heh. Darryl hopes so, and with a final proclamation that "there's better lives than this one," he leaves Andy to it.
Darryl THs that he's never been lucky. Not jut the lottery. "Stuff like developing a soy allergy at 35. Who gets a soy allergy at 35? And why is soy in everything?" I thought he was going to bring up another obvious example of his unluckiness, but apparently he's saving that one up.
Ryan goes up to Pam, who's filling in at Reception. "Right back where I like you," he tools. I don't even really like Pam any more and I still want her to punch him. When he asks her to make copies, she says no, and when he busts her buying lottery tickets, he wisely says, "Everyone wants to be rich, but nobody wants to work for it." Pam: "You came in at 10:30 today, right?" Yeah, Ryan's making his own damn copies.
Andy is floundering, asking the applicants if they have warehouse licenses or masters in warehouse sciences. One of them asks of this is a joke, but he insists it's real. "Painfully real, what is happening right now."
Kevin's trying to crawl with a box on his back, and Jim and Dwight are trying to think of a better method. "We should be able to find a more efficient way of moving boxes than Madge or Hide," Dwight sneers. He and Jim share a chuckle, then look at the cameras nervously and talk about how smart Madge and Hide actually are. Suddenly people are worried about being discreet in front of the cameras at this late date? Kevin brings up the idea of how his sisters used to grease him up to slide him across the kitchen floor, and won't drop it until Erin urgently grabs him by the arm and hisses at him to move on. "I like it, but they hate it, so drop it."
Andy is getting into the weeds with a discussion of bubble wrap, and the thing you know, he finds Darryl in the break room, reading a novel. "Did you hire them?" Darryl asks. Andy says no, they left. "I got confused and frankly a little weird, and frankly the stuff that you said didn't help." Darryl tells Andy to fire him. Three times. Dead serious. Andy stands in shock, probably wondering who his new unwilling best friend would be if he did that.
Andy THs that maybe that was some kind of test Darryl was giving him, which he had no idea what to do with other than to say, "I'm going to hire some people for the warehouse and hope that you eventually start feeling better. I really hope that's what he and I mean."
In desperation, Andy goes out to the bullpen to ask if anyone knows anyone. "Come on, Oscar! Who's the most jacked guy in all of Scranton? Like, your wildest fantasy guy?" Anyone who expects Oscar to be offended will be disappointed by the three minutes he does on the subject of the most muscular guys in town.
Jim and Pam are on break, and she's trying to sell him her lottery-winner fantasy, even though he's perfectly happy with his. Then he has to remind Dwight that Erin wanted a hot chocolate tea. I'm going to start skipping these pointless non-scenes, I swear to God.
Andy's got three new candidates in the conference room. One's a Ph.D. candidate who teaches Wednesdays through Fridays, one does ten minutes on his hearing issues (is this an hour-long episode, or what the hell, with all the filibustering?) and then there's the gym rat with the partially blurred out tank top slogan (who Oscar is ogling through the window). Andy blathers excitedly about getting to meet people he wouldn't ordinarily meet, "or know, or even talk to."
Jim and Dwight return to the warehouse to find Erin and Kevin having laid a path of grease down on the floor, claiming Jim and Dwight said it was a good idea. Montage of them trying different ways of sliding boxes stacked on a trash can lid down the run, as Jim and Dwight admit that while it's not the best idea, they have to move the boxes. "And we're obviously not going to carry them," Dwight says. In the background, Kevin slips and crashes to the ground.
In the lobby, Andy introduces Darryl to his new warehouse crew, but Darryl still just wants to be fired. Andy gets in his face and asks what he can do to make Darryl happy after not winning the lottery. And right then, Darryl asks for Andy's job. "I'll do it better than you. I earned it. I deserve it. I got passed over God knows why, for reasons I cannot and will not understand. The job was mine, Andy. Everyone said it was mine. Make me manager or fire me." Andy refuses, saying it's his job, and adds that Darryl wasn't even in line. "You have a history of being short with people," he understates, plus the replacement Darryl chose for himself was under qualified. Hearing-problem-guy interrupts until Andy shuts him down, then goes back to remind Darryl about his lack of business experience. "You were gonna take classes under Deangelo, what happened to that?" "He died," Darryl says. Andy corrects him, and says he'd be happy to send Darryl to the same classes if he asked. Again with the hearing-loss-guy. Seriously, enough with the padding. Darryl makes excuses regarding his daughter, but then Andy brings up Darryl's other leisure time activities, like Darryl was the one who was in Sweeney Todd. But he actually has a point: "Jo saw something in you. She loved you .She gave you a shot and then you stopped pushing. She noticed." All Darryl has to say to that is, "Okay." Asked for clarification, he adds, "Don't fire me." Andy looks relieved. Darryl THs, "My future's not going to be determined by seven little white lotto balls. It's going to be determined by two big black balls. I control my destiny. I do." Too bad he couldn't have realized that earlier.
Outside, Darryl tells Andy he'll get some guys. "Best of your bunch and my bunch. I'll tell you now, though, it's going to be mostly my bunch." So then they come around to the open warehouse door to find the truck nearly empty, the forklift impaled in the wall, grease on the floor, and a long, double row of paper boxes soaking it up from the shelves to the door, and four idiots of varying egregiousness trying to explain how they got here. Turns out this latest iteration is Jim's idea, which he's pretty reluctant to explain. But Kevin pushes a deeply embarrassed Jim to share his name for the system, "Senor Loadenstein." Because "es muy rapido." You can tell Andy's pissed because he's calling Jim by his actual name instead of Tuna. Darryl demands to see how it works, so Dwight and Jim get on opposite ends of a rope, count "Uno! Dos! Tres!" and start dragging a pallet loaded with half a dozen boxes (and a motorcycle-helmeted Erin to hold them on) down the greased course between two walls of paper boxes. "Yeah, I lost my client," Phyllis THs. And lots of viewers, I suspect.
In the tag, after Toby shares his dream of launching his true-crime podcast, "The Flenderson Files," Jim and Pam tell us is just the employees talking about what they'd do with lottery money. It's an unlikely hybrid of both of their fantasies, with the least realistic elements of each combined. "Of course, the schools are terrible, but what are you gonna do?" Can't have everything.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter , or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.