a third!

Yep, we finished week #3 at Amazon and are 1/3rd of the the way done. The work is pretty mindless and repetitive but you are busy enough that the time goes fairly quickly. We are both tired and sore when our shift ends as we hobble, moan and groan our way to the parking lot. :-) We have been using a lot of
these

My shoulder muscles are bothering me the most. I find myself stooping over a table for hours on end and am trying to watch my posture while working to help relieve those muscles.
We have both noticed our hands have swollen the last couple of days so we are not wearing our rings until either the job ends or the swelling subsides.
When the orders are slow Amazon offers "VTO" which stands for "voluntary time off". Our department was offered VTO three days this week. The first was Wednesday night (actually Thursday morning) at 2 am. We declined since we had less then 2 hours to finish our shift, plus it was our first 10 hour shift and we wanted the accomplishment of finishing. They offered it again Friday evening so we took them up on it versus being sent to another department to work. Last night when we got to work we did our start up meeting, stretches and got our work station assignments. When I got to my station the conveyor belt was empty. No totes full of "stuff" to pack. There is usually a line of totes on the belt for as far as the eye can see, Oh Oh. Our supervisor started making calls and a few totes started arriving but not nearly enough to keep more then three or four people even remotely busy and there were twelve of us. The announcement was made that we should start cleaning and restocking the entire department so that is what we did until our first break when they offered VTO once again. A few of my co-workers took them up on it but we decided to stay since it was pretty early in our shifts. There were still no totes after break so they had Rudee and I putting colored tape on the floor of a new area they are setting up. The different colored tape outlines "parking places" for skids, carts, trash cans etc. That took us to our lunch break when they offered VTO once again. Our supervisor said he needed to get the department down to just three people since they had another 13 coming in for training on the second half of our shift. We decided to go ahead and give up and go. We had stuck it out for 5 hours doing "busy work" and just wanted to be done with it. We ended up with three of our co-workers needing a ride so we all piled into the Dakota and headed for the Huddle House restaurant where we had a great time eating, talking and getting to know each other better. We had a great time!

I'm not sure what next week will look like, we will have the five work campers who joined us last week and have been working 5 hour shifts now working the full 10 hours, plus 13 new employees that are training. I sure hope the work is going to be there for us, otherwise our area is going to be the cleanest packaging area in Amazon history! :-) I'll keep you posted.