Working Man

Nov 30, 2009 10:31

It's been a few weeks since my last entry. The main reason for the delay is likely that in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving I was working 8 hour nights sorting and stocking merchandise. I found a good analogy for it though; imagine you're helping a friend move into a new house. For some reason, their boxes have been packed on to palates and wrapped in saran-wrap to keep from rattling apart in transit. To help them unpack, you have to sort the palates down in to 10 or 12 rooms (aisles) that the stuff goes into. Once the palates are sorted, you take the sorted boxes of things and put them near where they should go in the room (near the appropriate shelf in the aisle). Once that's done, then you can start opening the boxes and actually filling the shelves. Then you have to clean up the rooms by picking up the boxes, plastic packaging, and stuff that wouldn't fit. And, of course, all of the boxes are not a uniform shape, size or weight. We handle everything from the heavy items (25 lb bags of dog food or kitty litter, 40 lb sacks containing 8 five pound sacks of sugar/flour) to light boxes (packages of potato chips, boxes of paper towels, etc.)

In theory this should all take the night crew a little more than seven hours. In practice it always took more than eight, sometimes nine, depending on how much stuff there was.

And now the store internal politics are figuring in to the schedules. The store manager is on vacation, so while he's away the assistant managers are making a play for attention by cutting hours and giving as little overtime as possible. Last week I work five 8s that went long. This week I'm working five four-hour shifts and I am expected to be in the store for no more than four hours each day.

I guess it was silly of me to think I could avoid office politics in a job like this.

The grocery manager, on being told that there was to be no overtime, said something like "There goes the integrity of the store" meaning that without overtime the aisles would likely not be "faced" well: products would not be lined up on the shelves and look nice. The stockers, in general, just put the stuff on the shelf. Making it look nice is either someone else's problem, or something to be done later.

The four hour shifts feel absurdly short. There's no lunch break. With ten minutes left in the shift, I asked the foreman what I should do. He said "Well... you picked up the aisles and did the repack for 2 and 3? I dunno. Boxes are crushed... go home? or hang out for another ten minutes." So I meandered. I actually wasted more time on that shift than I do on an 8 hour shift, I think.

On a slightly related note, my perception of what day it is has completely gone out the window. Once I was out of school, what day it was stopped mattering as much and my internal perception started slipping. The only reason to know what the day was was for weekly meetings at work (easy because they came after the weekend). I think that's part of why I started reading so many webcomics: knowing that these comics only update on Mondays or Wednesdays made me take time to think about what day it was before I clicked their links. Then I switched most of my reading list to RSS feeds and was more or less unemployed. My grasp of the days faltered again.

Now I need to know what days I work, and I have those set up in my google calendar and the calendar on my phone, but the 8 hour shifts span two days, starting at 2230 one day and continuing until 0700 or later the next. At least the four hour shifts are on a single day, from 0100 to 0500. For most of Saturday I thought "tomorrow" was Monday. This is not helped by my sleep schedule having shifted roughly 12 hours. I blacked out my window with tin foil and cover the cracks around my door as best as I can to manage how much light gets in during the day. I should probably have gone to sleep an hour or two ago, so I can sleep while Mike and Amy are at work and not have to worry about them waking me up when they get home round 1700.
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