Happy Thanksgiving

We want to wish all our friends a blessed Thanksgiving.  We also give thanks for our family.  We love you all and wish we could be together.   We are cooking a turkey dinner for ourselves with all the trimmings.  Because we only have a small oven its a very small 10 lb bird. We are watching the parade and then some football.

We are just relaxing before the overtime hits here at Amazon.  They have hired a lot more workampers this year so it is doubtful we will have to go to 11 hour days. (Give thanks for this!!) We should be starting our 50 hour weeks next week.  The week before Christmas they may go to a 60 hour week.  But its only another 4 weeks so I think we will make it!!



 

New Job at Amazon

We were given a chance to change departments at Amazon.  Things like this usually don’t happen, once you are assigned a department you have to stay with that department.

We have changed from inbound receiving to outbound ‘single toys’.  In this department we are putting things into boxes instead of removing items.  They really have this process down.  Remember all those items we were receiving and the stowers were putting away? We now have pickers (people who go around retrieving the items you have ordered).  The pickers put the items into a tote and the conveyors bring them to us to be packed.  There are 2 places those orders go.  If it is only one item, it comes to us in singles, if more than one item is goes to Crisplant.

We have a station that is complete with boxes of all sizes, a tape machine that has buttons for the corresponding sizes of the boxes and a small printer for packing slips.  Between each station if a big mesh basket that holds the plastic bubbles that go into the boxes.  When we scan an item, the computer tells us what size box to use, we press the button on the tape machine and the tape comes out the right size and wet. Once the box is packed we put what Amazon calls a SPOO sticker in the left corner of the box.  As this box goes down the conveyor, the SPOO sticker is read by the computer and it prints out your delivery information. Its then routed to the proper truck for delivery.  Amazon expects us to be packing a box every minute or 60 per hour! 

We will stay in the outbound department now until the end of our time here.  We did this so that we can get in some overtime hours.  Amazon has been bringing product into this warehouse since summer so there are not a lot of hours here for all the work campers in inbound.  There were about 40 of us that switched departments. But outbound will be very busy soon.

Now we really feel like Santa’s elves!!