warehouse of the weird

We were flipping through our local newspaper not long ago when we read this headline: "Storage for the creepy and quirky: Warehouse 13." With a title like that, we thought, this story will be right up our alley.

But instead of an article about a distribution center or some offbeat material handling solution, it turned out to be a review of a new SyFy cable TV series. "Warehouse 13" is a fictional building in South Dakota's Badlands where the U.S. government has been secretly storing famous objects, like Harry Houdini's wallet, John Dillinger's gun, and Paul Revere's lantern, that seem to have some sort of mysterious power. (Tag line: "If it's causing trouble out there, it belongs in here.") In the first episode, Secret Service agents must find missing objects and return them to the warehouse shelves before they wreak supernatural havoc.

As you might expect, the facility manager doesn't use ordinary methods for getting around Warehouse 13; a zip line takes him swiftly past endless rows of shelving. Hmmm ... we think that would be much more fun than a narrow-aisle truck.