They lived in the same town, Shelby, and Glover started giving Dockery a ride to work. Dockery was a “boxer”: he took the shrink-wrapped jewel cases and stacked them in a cardboard box for shipping. Glover was a “dropper”: he fed the packaged disks into the machine. The two worked opposite ends of the shrink-wrapping machine, twelve feet apart. One of Glover’s co-workers was Tony Dockery, another temporary hire. Its lineage was distinguished: PolyGram was a division of the Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips, the co-inventor of the CD. On a busy day, the plant produced a quarter of a million CDs. New albums were released in record stores on Tuesdays, but they needed to be pressed, packaged, and shrink-wrapped weeks in advance. It ran shifts around the clock, every day of the year. The factory sat on a hundred acres of woodland and had more than three hundred thousand square feet of floor space. “We’d run them in the plant in the week, and they’d have them in the flea markets on the weekend,” he said. In time, Glover became aware of a far-reaching underground trade in pre-release disks. But at the party, even in front of the supervisors, it seemed clear that the disks had been getting out. He knew that the plant managers were concerned about leaking, and he’d heard of employees being arrested for embezzling inventory. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement.

Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant.

Dell Glover manufactured CDs for a living, but he began to wonder: if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD? Photograph by Jehad Nga

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