"if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room"

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

the end is in sight!

We received an email Monday evening from Amazon announcing our "furlough" date. Our last shift will be this Friday night, so once we clock out Saturday morning at 4am we are free to pack up and leave. The only problem with that is when we get off work we are both dead tired and who wants to start out at 4 am anyway! We are planning on coming back to the rig and crashing for a few hours and then head toward our daughter house sometime that morning or maybe later depending on how comfortable that bed is. :-)

Yesterday was supposed to be the busiest shipping day of the year for Amazon. On our shift, in our department we had 39 people packing boxes and moving them down the conveyor. When we started 9 weeks ago there were only around eight of us. At one point they said we were shipping out over 3500 "units" (boxes) per hour. That is a ton of product seeing that each "unit" has to be boxed and sealed by hand. Needless to say we were both bushed when we got off work. Things should start slowing down in the next couple of days as the Christmas orders slow and people start thinking more about faith, family and food rather then about gifts.

Our last weekend off we made a trip to Horseshoe Casino in New Albany, Indiana with some of our co-workers. I found a great deal on rooms at the Casino Hotel on "cyber Monday" and we each got our rooms at $46 for the night. Larry, one of our fellow packers, plays craps and he came out the big winner. Not to be outdone I had some more luck on the penney slots. One machine I cashed in almost $200 over and above the money I put into it to get started. :-)
We had a fun night out with our friends, just the thing to recharge us for our final week. :-)

Once all the fun at Amazon ends I will write about our experiences and thoughts about being part of Amazon's Camperforce so stay tuned. I plan on tearing the antenna booster down in the next day or two so will probably be incommunicado but will update you all when we land in Indiana.

3 comments:

  1. Can you believe that it's almost over?!! We are really looking forward to getting done as well. We plan to head out on Sunday. I wish we had been able to get together with you guys more than just the one time. Hopefully sometime we will land in the same area when we aren't spending so much time working, and on different shifts to boot! :)

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  2. We worked at Amazon.com fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada in Nov./Dec. 2011. Baby, it's COLD in that part of Nevada! Brr, we froze from our noses to our toes-es. Nighttime temps in Fallon (1/2 hour away but the closest RV park we could find with availability) got down to -4 F., and that didn't include the wind chill factor. But I'll tell you what, we had the most gorgeous sunrises and sunsets driving to and from work. Almost made it worth the cold, almost.

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  3. Will you take the fiver to Indiana? We know that casino from back in the day when they actually "sailed" on the river.

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