Today is an old day

On July 11 2014 21:59 Shebuha wrote:
Read your last 2 blogs. I've done the same job you're doing here in Canada at a company called Versacold. Pretty demanding job TBH, but it's good work and fairly rewarding in my eyes. Versacold had a shit ton of $$$$$$$ incentives to work really hard so that was super nice.

Unfortunately it's the type of job where if you're having an off day or can't focus because there's shit on your mind or whatever it can really bite you in the ass. Like you said in your other blog just keep your head down and work. Put in everything you can every day and eventually you'll hardly make any mistakes.

At my current job I was EXACTLY like you are right now. I'd come in looking like absolute hell and people would ask me if I was going to survive the day... I'd feel kinda depressed because every day felt the same and I was just working for the weekend, but then I realized that life truly is what you make of it. You can go around being a miserable asshole who brings all of their problems from home into work, or vice versa, or you can just... be fuckin' happy as often as you can! It's not easy, but it makes absolutely everything better.

GL at work, dude.

On July 12 2014 10:58 Just_a_Moth wrote:
Just out of curiosity what exactly do you do at your job?

On July 13 2014 00:39 Impervious wrote:
If you're making 60k a year doing that job, consider yourself lucky. I've done that exact job for a few different companies here in Canada. One company expected 300+ pieces an hour (although their warehouse setup was designed with that kind of speed in mind, and we were using double picker machines allowing us to work with 2 pallets at a time instead of just one). The lowest expectation I've seen was 120 an hour..... And, yes, accuracy was important, I've seen people get fired for screwing up too often even if they were picking the required amount, as well as people getting fired for going to slowly, even if they were almost perfectly accurate.

One place had a setup where you'd have to go into both a freezer section and a dry section, with the freezer being kept at -24 Celsius or colder at all times. and with the fan blowing the wind chill was terrible in there, and the dry section would get as warm as 30 Celsius or higher in the summer, so moving in and out of each area was terrible, you'd either start getting used to the warm and suddenly you feel like you're in a deep freeze, or you're starting to get used to the cold, and suddenly you feel like you're in a sauna..... Another place had a lot of heavy stuff, where the average box weighed about 30lbs, and some were getting close to 100 lbs, and you were expected to stack them as high as possible, to the point where they'd barely fit into the truck..... Headset systems are nice for preventing errors, but some places still use a pen and paper system, where it gets rather tough to prevent errors until you know the place inside and out. And the jobs don't pay that well here, the most I got paid was about 25% above minimum wage, with no benefits or incentives of any kind (a little over 25k CAD a year).....

I used to play football competitively, so I'm in better physical shape than most people, so the physical aspect of the job wasn't tough for me. It was actually kinda nice, because for me it was like being paid to work out. I've also worked in other warehouse type environments prior to a picker job, so I'm familiar with forlifts and other types of equipment used in warehouses, and was comfortable with the equipment from day one (obviously it takes time to get truly comfortable to any new piece of machinery, but being familiar with similar equipment goes a long way towards that).

Once you get into a rhythm, I found that the job is a piece of cake, you shouldn't make any errors, even while on "Autopilot". But that job path here in Canada, or at least where I am in Canada, pays like shit, which is why I had to move on to something else.

Knowing what products are good as a "base" to your pallet are a good thing to start with. Take a minute or two to go through your list prior to starting to see if you have any good "base" items. Basically, stuff that is heavy and in strong boxes are good for putting at the bottom. One place I worked at used a lot of canned goods, and I'd make the bottom of my pallets occasionally with packages of cans, interlocking the layers (if you're short 1 or 2 for a layer you can just space them out a bit to make it fit, and if you've got a few too many for a layer, you can make a new layer with the next product and continue that, finishing off with the remaining product from the earlier layers on top to keep everything as stable as possible) If possible, maybe you could run around the warehouse grabbing that stuff first, then go back and throw everything else on top. It may require you to run around a bit more, but you'll be able to build your pallet much sturdier, allowing you to move around faster, and have less product damaged in transit. Think about it like building a house, if you make the foundation flimsy, the house will collapse, no matter how beautifully done everything else is. If you build the bottom and the corners to be sturdy and interlock like brickwork wherever possible, you won't have to deal with things like stuff falling off your pallet while driving around, or stuff won't get damaged when being wrapped/loaded on the truck/bouncing around while being driven, etc. The headset systems I've used still allow you to go do this, once you know how they operate.