B365V3.56 - One is the loneliest number

Where do I begin?  Well let's see, when we last left off I was thinking about a second job, working evenings in the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Pittsburgh, (Crafton if you're nasty), but first came the orientation.  Now when I heard back from Amazon I was told I was hired for the shift I had applied for, which would constitute 5 evenings a week, from 6pm - 10 pm.  But first I had to find the place, since the cool kids don't hang out in Crafton, why should I?  So, before I could do orientation, I had to take a recon mission first to the neighborhood, just so I could see where what buses go to whichever sections would be close to my job.  As luck would have it, my recon turned out to be a success, but I had orientation on a Monday at 2pm, when I am usually at the real job, so I did as much stuff early as I could on Monday to better facilitate me getting out of work on time to go to this event. 

Given orientation was the Monday after Veteran's Day, that meant going into work early and getting sales numbers done for four days as opposed to three, as well as getting a grocery order together and sent in, so I was all kinds of on the spot, getting things done.  I made it to the gig, albeit about 15 minutes late, and when I sat down and they handed out sheets, my schedule said I would be working from Wednesday thru Sunday 8pm to 12am.  At some point between my clearing my background and drug test and my orientation they decided to do away with the 6pm to 10pm shift entirely.  That switch was not great, it limited my bus options home from work to one bus at 12:30 am at a bus stop that was better than a mile from where I was working.  They then proceeded to tell us, some nights we will be asked to work overtime, never more than an hour though, which we can't refuse.  Yes, but that hour turns into many more hours for me, I could either stay in the breakroom until buses started running again in the am, or I could hoof it back into town.  I lived that miserable existence in radio a while back, where I could spend the night at the station after I turned the signal off at 1am and wait until the first bus at 6am, or I could walk home.  East Pittsburgh to Squirrel Hill is not a fun walk, let me tell you, North Braddock and Rankin aren't places you want to visit in the daytime, let alone be walking through at night.  For those that want to know, it is about a three hour walk, but when your second job at the time has you in Lawrenceville at 10am, you do what you can.  But those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, and I have lived the life of two jobs with one of them ending after the buses shut off for the night.

Still, I was thinking that as long as I had that one bus and I had not been trapped yet by the mandatory overtime rule, perhaps I could make this work.  I am told my first day will be Nov 20th, a Sunday.  Seemed kind of stupid to me, have me work a day, then two days off, then go back for Wednesday through Sunday.  But I am thinking cool enough, I will be working both my jobs on Thanksgiving, racking up the time and a half hours.  Money, money, money.   I get out of orientation, I am supposed to go back on Thursday for a training type day, we are to be shown the warehouse and where everything is.  Fair enough.  During this training day I am told to go wait in the breakroom, I am given my id badge so I can enter the building of my own accord and clock in and out on the time clocks.  The time clocks also hold the schedule in them, so you can tap your badge, press view schedule and your schedule pops up on the screen.  We are shown this on our training day, as well as where the utility dispensers are, you tap your badge for extra things you may need like work vests, gloves, box cutters, etc.  and they fall out, unlike George Costanza's Twix bar.  During our break during this walkabout kind of day, I go into the bathroom and above the urinal is a pee chart, to check your hydration level or some such thing.  The color and odor of your pee determines how hydrated you are.  Now I don't know about the ladies room, perhaps there are pee charts in there as well, but when I go to the bathroom I am not all investigative about my pee, nor am I sniffing the urinal for odor.  For me the process is all about ready, aim, fire.  There was also a sign in the breakroom about how many days they had been accident free, which was on like 6 or something.

Also during our walkabout, we are shown where to go at the beginning of the shift, we go to this area at the center of the warehouse and check the roster sign in sheet, it will tell us where to go and what we will be doing that particular day.  Not to worry though, we are going to have someone with us our first day on the warehouse floor, showing us what to do.  Cool enough, I have never worked in a warehouse before.

So, I go in for my first day on the floor so to speak, I find my way back to the center station, There is no roster sheet, no one knows where the hell we are going, I am standing there with about 30 or so new hires and they broke us up by asking who wants to go where.  I head off with the pallet wrappers, which was probably a mistake on my part.  Revisit my history some day and my challenges with wrapping Chrstmas presents, then picture your purchase on a pallet with a bunch of other "presents" and leave it to my devices and see what happens.  We were given about 10 minutes worth of instruction on how to wrap pallets before we were sent off into the wilds of the Amazon warehouse to wrap things that weren't moving.  It is at ths part of a National Geographic special where you see a bunch of young animals dying, just cut loose into the wild, left to fend for themselves.  I get called over to lane H, to close pallets, which is where you finish wrapping full pallets so they can go on the truck.  I can't even being to tell you how much plastic I wasted on that effort.  I finished that project and was once again wandering the warehouse with no guidance to where to go next, eventually I just went wherever I saw a pallet that needed wrapped.  Spun my web of lies and deceipt around it, and then wandered off to find more pallets.  Finally the shift ends, I go to punch out and whle at the time clock I check my shedule, and the fuckers changed that on me too.  First they changed my shift, then they changed my workdays as well.  Now I am working Sat thru Wed with Thursday and Friday off.  Some I am losing the extra time I would pick up on Thanksgiving and they are changing the days for which I was hired.  (Not to mention the sign in the breakroom was down to 1 day since the last accident.)  So now I am pissed, and I take an angry 1 mile walk to the bus stop, thankfully I didn't miss the last bus but I start weighing the plusses ad minuses in my head.  The extra money would be good, but I could just work an extra couple hours a day at my current job and and make the same amount, and not have to deal with worrying about missing a bus or walking a mile to catch one, so for the time being I am back to being a one job person.