Last night at work, the shift began at 9:30 that evening. It started off with the customary three minute meeting, discussing the usual, the scanning percentage of our previous work day, safety issues, teamwork, change in schedule, and all that jazz. After the meeting we proceeded on over to our areas, the belt started up and we began working the shift.
After about three and half hours into the workday, I began to feel myself overwhelmed with a lot of my assigned freight, and I wasn’t the only one. We were unloading two trucks at once, and one just happened to be loaded Houston freight. So here I am, buried deep in boxes and packages. I’m thinking to myself, “The lead sees how backed up I am, maybe he will come down and give me a hand.” WRONG! He proceeded to stand around, spinning in circles to share gossip with some of our fellow co-workers. Which is fine, because, hell that’s all you can expect from him.
I cleared my area within a matter of fifteen minutes to half an hour and was back on track. I just knew that after the gentleman that was working utility would move my full pallets, and bring me fresh ones to start over, I would be able to catch up.
When the shift ended, I wrapped up the last of my pallets, disconnected my scanner, and ambled up to the top of the belt to clock out. Just as I was about to swipe my card, I noticed more that half of the shift workers were up front helping Mrs. Barbra with the TXX/SXX Xerox freight. It just looked like mountains and mountains of boxes everywhere. So instead of clocking out like I planned, I decided to help. I have worked TXX/SXX before, and trust me when I say, it is HELL!
I was kind of annoyed throughout the whole process, because as myself and a my co-workers were helping Mrs. Barbra, one of the leads was bitching about how much he wanted to go home, and he was just standing there looking at us. The leads and the supervisors are not permitted to leave until the floor is picked up. Then after they look at the scanning records, they go home. I was thinking to myself, “If you want to go home so bad, then come over and give us a hand instead of standing there, doing nothing, glaring and talking smack.” But being who he is, I didn’t expect much from him. Of course the other lead and the supervisor were too busy carrying on a conversation amongst themselves to be worried about what progress we were making with getting the freight picked up.
It took us an extra hour and forty-five minutes to get all the SXX/TXX freight double scanned, stacked, and wrapped. It would have took less time if we had a little bit more help from the spectators. But hey, I’m not complaining, hell I got a little bit more time on my next paycheck.