Guess What?

My personal Amazon adventure continues :-). My work week started Black Friday.  Our first inkling of the mayhem to come was the traffic backed up to enter the parking lot, the jockeying for a parking space, and the line to simply enter into the warehouse. I was a half hour early, having driven in with Al, and watched the day shift masses departing. Wow! There's a lot of people working here now.

I wasn't sure of where to report to, as I had ended my week working in receiving. A phone call to the CamperForce office manager informed me to report back to CrisPlant for packing. So that's where I went. Would it surprise anyone to hear that my name wasn't on the roster...and neither was Laura's name. We reported to our PA (Process Assistant), explained our situation, and he said "oh, you're supposed to be in Singles". Uh, no, we were transferred to Crisplant last week. "Oh, that's right, you went to Receiving. That's where you'll be from now on". Uh, no, that was just for the weekend. "Oh, ok, wait here". Finds the manager and finds yes, we belong to Crisplant now." Ok, well, you're extras tonight. Come with me. " Wow, this can't be good.

Well, we ended up working in SLAM that night. IF you want a mind-numbing, brain-cell killing job, this it it. For 10 hours, I stood at the beginning of the shipping conveyor, as the bar-coded packages came up from Crisplant, and made sure the boxes were straight and right side up so the bar code scanner could properly read the bar code in order to affix the shipping label to the box. I never say this, but...O..M...G!!! I would rather be back in ICQA again (and for a humorous view of that wonderful job, check out Darrell's blog here) than ever do that again! I was so frustrated at the end of that shift that I was thinking of going to HR and see if they would transfer me back to Receiving...at least I know that, I'm pretty good at it, and it occupies a few brain cells. But I decided to wait and see how Saturday went.

Saturday, again, no names on the roster. Again, check with the PA. A different PA. A PA who was truly wonderful! Finally! Heard our story, and talked to John the manager. He made sure we were assigned to CrisPlant, and then adopted us into his area. So Saturday we learned a new process, "buffering". This section of CrisPlant, "Rebins" is where orders are manually sorted rather than by the conveyor system. As the totes full of goodies come down the conveyor, we grab it, scan the tote with our scanner, and the scanner tells us what "buffer" to put it in. A buffer is a marked out space on the floor, and there's anywhere from 5 to 20 totes in a buffer. There's 40 buffers laid out. There's a total of 8 orders in each buffer. When a buffer is finished, it gets moved to the "rebin" area, where it is sorted into the 8 separate orders and then sent to a packager. So Laura and I buffered until the second break, and actually had a decent time. The people working there were fun, the work was fast so the time went quickly, and you used your brain cells to keep track of everything. The last 2 hours of the shift we worked on packaging the orders.

Sunday we were actually on the roster, and worked at Crisplant order packaging all night. And Monday we were on the roster again, but assigned to Rebin again. We buffered until the meal break, and the last half of the shift we were taught another new task, the rebinning sortation. This is the sorting of the buffers into the 8 individual orders.

So, in the 5 weeks I've worked here, let's see what I've done:
Receiving
ICQA
Prep
CrisPlant packaging
SLAM
Buffering
Rebinning

Am I versatile or what :-)? Al is still applying band-aids and ice packs, and knows everyone I think!

Thanksgiving was nice, with about 40 people from the campground gathering at the restaurant for dinner. The weather that day was beautiful, but has been lousy again, raining for the last 3 days. It doesn't really matter, as we've been doing not much besides working, sleeping and eating, but a glimpse of sunshine would make you feel better. We are still waiting for word on our holding tank, and I surely hope it will be a swift shipping and repair, as it does get old schlepping down to the bath house to use the restroom. Especially in the chilly rainy weather.

My mandatory overtime night this week of Wednesday has been changed to a voluntary overtime night, and I have elected to not take it. There's a couple of personal issues have cropped up that I need to be available for, so I won't be on again until Friday. We'll see what new adventures the new workweek will bring :-).