Manual Labor
I’ve been working out at the Steep & Brew warehouse to make a little extra money during break. It is nice to experience some good ol’ fashion mindless labor in contrast to all this fancy-shmancy college thinking business. While at work I can basically let my mind wander for hours at a time. It’s nice to allow myself some free mental time to nurture all those festering creative thoughts in my brain. I wrote an entire short story the other day. A scary story no less.
My work basically consists of putting coffee in bags, putting bags in crates, putting smaller bags into larger bags, putting bags in boxes, putting stickers on boxes, putting stickers on bags, and putting crates on shelves. At least it’s better than washing out those goddamned bins all day. Which is what I did all last summer. Well one day I got to cut open hundreds of cartons of expired apple and grape smoothie concentrate and dump the contents down the drain. Over the summer I also had to ride my bike for half an hour each way to work and back. Now that sucked. Although I did find a hundred dollars on the sidewalk once.
Actually work now really isn’t so bad. I get to do a not more variety of jobs than anyone else there. Sometimes I get to do some grinding. Sometimes I get a huge pallet of boxes and I get to take each box, put a sticker on it, and stack them up on a different pallet. Sometimes there is a box of something I need on the very top shelf and I get to climb all the way up there and hope I don’t fall off and die. The other day someone put the wrong stickers on a bunch of bags and I got to go over them all with the correct sticker. Once we got a giant shipment of mugs with twelve mugs in each box. Now half of the mugs were red and the other half were blue, but they packaged it with six of each color in each box. We wanted all the same color in each box so I had to cut open each box, swap six of one color from one box into the other and vice versa, seal up the box, and label the outside of the box as either containing all reds or all blues. It was absolutely thrilling. Sometimes I do get some genuine mental stimulation. When I fill orders of 12 oz bags I get a long list of numbers ranging from 1 to 30, informing me of how many bags of each kind we need. I have to put exactly 48 bags in each box, but I don’t want to split one kind into multiple boxes. So I get to look at the list and try to group them together in different combinations to get forty-eights. My mental arithmetic has improved dramatically.
While repetitive work is a nice change from college, it makes me appreciate the fact that I am going to school so I won’t have to do a job like this for the rest of my life. There are some guys who have been doing the same job there for almost twenty years! Work there is bearable knowing that I won’t be there for long; soon I’ll head back to school. I also feel motivated to work hard and do a good job because my father is the owner of the company. I have an incentive for the company to be successful. The other guys there are really nice. I get a chance to talk with totally different kinds of people there than I do at school.
Working at Steep & Brew is several orders of magnitude better than working at Jenifer Street Market. But that place is a story for another day.
I do wish that I had accomplished a little more over this break. Like more reading and stuff. Work is exhausting. I leave home around 8:00 and get home around 5:30 every day smelling like coffee and covered in grounds. I shower, eat, hang out with my friends or do stuff my family until bed at 12:30. I really have no free time. The cycle just keeps going and going until the weekend. I got so much more sleep while I was in college. So much for a relaxing break.
I better get to bed. The 7:00 alarm will be here all too soon and then I’m off to another day of work.
My work basically consists of putting coffee in bags, putting bags in crates, putting smaller bags into larger bags, putting bags in boxes, putting stickers on boxes, putting stickers on bags, and putting crates on shelves. At least it’s better than washing out those goddamned bins all day. Which is what I did all last summer. Well one day I got to cut open hundreds of cartons of expired apple and grape smoothie concentrate and dump the contents down the drain. Over the summer I also had to ride my bike for half an hour each way to work and back. Now that sucked. Although I did find a hundred dollars on the sidewalk once.
Actually work now really isn’t so bad. I get to do a not more variety of jobs than anyone else there. Sometimes I get to do some grinding. Sometimes I get a huge pallet of boxes and I get to take each box, put a sticker on it, and stack them up on a different pallet. Sometimes there is a box of something I need on the very top shelf and I get to climb all the way up there and hope I don’t fall off and die. The other day someone put the wrong stickers on a bunch of bags and I got to go over them all with the correct sticker. Once we got a giant shipment of mugs with twelve mugs in each box. Now half of the mugs were red and the other half were blue, but they packaged it with six of each color in each box. We wanted all the same color in each box so I had to cut open each box, swap six of one color from one box into the other and vice versa, seal up the box, and label the outside of the box as either containing all reds or all blues. It was absolutely thrilling. Sometimes I do get some genuine mental stimulation. When I fill orders of 12 oz bags I get a long list of numbers ranging from 1 to 30, informing me of how many bags of each kind we need. I have to put exactly 48 bags in each box, but I don’t want to split one kind into multiple boxes. So I get to look at the list and try to group them together in different combinations to get forty-eights. My mental arithmetic has improved dramatically.
While repetitive work is a nice change from college, it makes me appreciate the fact that I am going to school so I won’t have to do a job like this for the rest of my life. There are some guys who have been doing the same job there for almost twenty years! Work there is bearable knowing that I won’t be there for long; soon I’ll head back to school. I also feel motivated to work hard and do a good job because my father is the owner of the company. I have an incentive for the company to be successful. The other guys there are really nice. I get a chance to talk with totally different kinds of people there than I do at school.
Working at Steep & Brew is several orders of magnitude better than working at Jenifer Street Market. But that place is a story for another day.
I do wish that I had accomplished a little more over this break. Like more reading and stuff. Work is exhausting. I leave home around 8:00 and get home around 5:30 every day smelling like coffee and covered in grounds. I shower, eat, hang out with my friends or do stuff my family until bed at 12:30. I really have no free time. The cycle just keeps going and going until the weekend. I got so much more sleep while I was in college. So much for a relaxing break.
I better get to bed. The 7:00 alarm will be here all too soon and then I’m off to another day of work.