Jeffersonville Week One

Location: Louisville, KY (High 59, Low 32)

Wow, it’s been quite the week. Harry and I have found this facility to be quite different from what we are used to in Campbellsville. We knew it would be, but knowing, and adjusting to the difference, are two different things. I think we have settled in though and are now enjoying the experience more than we were the beginning of the week.

Some of the differences here are just because of its size and location. I was thinking yesterday that coming to this facility is like moving from a small town high school or small private college to one in a urban area. Just because of the numbers, some of the personal touch is lost. At the start up meetings in Campbellsville, there’s one big circle. (Well what I thought was big until we got here.) Even at our largest, right before we left to come to Jeffersonville, in the morning meeting, you could look around and see everyone. Here, there are SO many people. At the startup meetings, most people can’t even hear what the manager or PA (like an assistant manager) is saying. In Campbellsville, there is a list with everyone’s assignment. Here there is a board with assignments, but there are only a fraction of the people listed. No one who is new is on there, and here there are a LOT of new people. So basically in the morning, everyone goes and finds a job. Most days you just go where you were the day before and start doing whatever you were doing.

The first couple of days were very strange. Mostly because of the point I just made. Being new to the place, we didn’t have a job we’d been doing the day before. And they didn’t seem to know what to do with us (the whole group of us, not just Harry and me). So a lot of us spent most of Wednesday and all of Thursday making gift boxes. That was interesting.

Then on Friday morning, we seemed to settle in a bit and things started to fall into place. First good thing on Friday was that the PA was back who had moved us to doing the one job we’d had other than gift box making for a couple hours on Wednesday afternoon. So Friday I spent all day doing a task called “scan verify”, putting future gifts into shipping boxes and sending them down the line to be wrapped. I really enjoyed that job. I also finally got “permissions” for the computer as well, so I could sign in on my own rather than working under someone else’s login. Harry worked in “slam”, which meant he scanned a bar code to print a shipping label for the boxes coming off the gift wrap line to send them to the truck.

Yesterday morning when we went in, we employed the “do whatever you were doing” method, and trotted ourselves right back to the same place and got busy. It was awesome. It was the first day since we arrived that I could just walk in, sign in and get to work. I spent all morning doing the same job as the day before. Then the work for gift wrap ran out and we were moved over to packing. I wasn’t trained for it here, but we did it last year for a couple weeks at Campbellsville, so I just signed in at a station and got going. It wasn’t that different. Took me a few minutes to get acclimated, but luckily the computer gives enough prompts that it wasn’t really that hard to remember the process. We were both packing for the rest of the day.

The days are long. We get on the bus at 5:30 in the morning for a 6:30 start. (I really like the bus rides. There’s camaraderie with the other campers (there are 30 of us riding the bus) and it’s so great not to have to think about traffic or warming up the truck in the morning.) We are working 11 hour days here so we work from 6:30 until 6 with a 30 minute lunch at 11:15. Then we get on the bus for the ride home. By the time everyone gets on the bus it is anywhere from ten after to quarter after six. So we have been getting home a little before 7 pm. Like I said, a long day. But it’s only for 3 more weeks!!

Five work days down, 16 or 17 to go!!