Amazon Recap Part I

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 50, Low 25)

Well, now that we’re getting towards the end, I feel like I have enough of our Amazon experience under our belt to summarize our time here. We have one partial day to work on Saturday, and maybe overtime on Friday. We have to wait and see if we get the “you get the day off” phone call!

When we came to Campbellsville, we were both a little apprehensive because we had heard/read how difficult the job is, and we weren’t sure whether we were up to it. Although I think we both adapted to the work, there’s no getting around it – it is hard work. In Receiving where we were, we were sometimes lifting really heavy boxes, sometimes 30, 40 pound boxes, for hours on end. But all of the jobs have their own particular thing you have to deal with. Towards the end, I spent a lot of time working as “pg”, and although the lifting part was less there, I spent the day walking around on concrete, pushing carts of product etc. So my legs had to get used to that. The last few days we were working in packing, and there our hands got a workout. But it can be done - there are a lot of campers working there who are a lot older than Harry and me, and they all seem to do well.

Another big thing about working at Amazon is that we had to be flexible. They kind of move people around like pieces in a game depending on what the needs are at that particular moment. In the morning, we would get our assignment for the day, but we learned that only meant you started there. An hour later, we might be sent somewhere else, and then a couple hours later, over to a third place. It didn’t bother me, but I saw some people who would get frustrated because they’d only been somewhere a short time, and then would be told to go do something else. Nope, have to go with the flow…

We’ve been here since early September, and we’re definitely ready for a change, but overall we really enjoyed our time at Amazon (again with the caveat that the days are long and we come home tired and ready for bed). The people are great. We lucked out and had great managers to work for. We got to know the fulltime employees that were our coworkers for the three plus months, and had a lot of fun laughing and having a good time during our shifts. And of course we made some great friends among the other campers who were on the same shifts as us. We got together for dinners at local restaurants at least one, sometimes two nights a week over the past few weeks, and we had a great time each time.

Also, Amazon really does a great job showing appreciation to its employees. Throughout peak there were scheduled events, like a baked potato and chili lunch which was yummy. (And because we had overtime we got to enjoy it twice.) They did raffles for prizes, like each week during peak that you worked all your scheduled time, they gave away gift cards, and not small ones, $100 and more. And then there were surprise treats, like yesterday during second break when we arrived in the break room to find out they were giving away pretzels and cheese, or nachos and cheese. Or another day when we arrived at the break room to find people at the door passing out fresh fruit. And then there were the Campbellsville bucks that can be used to buy stuff at HR – Harry and I went this past Monday to cash them in and we each got a t-shirt and a couple chip clips. There were many times during our months there when there were things like that for the employees to break up the day to day routine and do a little something special for the workforce.

I think this is probably long enough for the first installment, so I will continue this in my next blog with some of our favorite and not so favorite aspects of life here in Campbellsville and working for Amazon…and after the new year when we get our last paycheck I will give some details about the financial aspects, as a few people have asked about that.

Happy to Have a Release Date!!

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 47, Low 35)

Today was our second day working in Outbound. It’s been nice going in at 6:30 instead of 6. Every little bit counts. :) I don’t know if I would have wanted to do that job the whole time I was here, but it’s been interesting to work on packing over the past couple of days. One thing that has been funny has been coming across a lot of merchandise that we unpacked out of shipments coming into the warehouse over the past months. Now we are putting them back in boxes and shipping them out. I’ve seen a lot of XBoxes…tools…monster dolls…legos…Melissa and David toys, etc. I feel most like Santa’s elf when a message prints out wishing the recipient a Merry Christmas. Kind of cool. We have one more day in that department before we have at least two days off. Then where we go from there, we aren’t quite sure yet. We’ve heard that we have only been assigned to Outbound for these few days, so I am guessing we may go back to Receiving on Friday if we still have OT scheduled? I guess we are back to waiting for a phone call…lol….

What we do know is that there is an end in sight. We were on our way home tonight and I was looking at my phone when I saw an email appear with the subject line that we have been waiting for – Your Release Date! Yay!!! So, what we found out is that our last shift is this Saturday, the 21st. We are happy with that. We will leave here on Sunday, and it will be so nice to get back on the road!! Just the rest of this week to go!

What Was I Saying?

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 45, Low 36)

Well, the last time I posted about our work at Amazon, we were waiting/hoping for a phone call telling us that mandatory OT was cancelled for today. Last night, after not getting said phone call, we resigned ourselves to going in to work today. I was looking on the bright side…a few more bucks for our savings account. It was a bit of a surprise last evening when we were looking at the Camperforce facebook page, and saw a posting by someone saying that Outbound Mandatory OT had been cancelled. We thought that was pretty peculiar given the fact that this is the middle of December and Outbound is in the middle of their peak. But we dutifully set our alarms, and got ourselves in to work.

Everyday at work we have a startup meeting. Today the meeting was going along normally until all of a sudden we heard the announcement that Campers in Shift A were going to Outbound after first break. That was unexpected. We all headed to our stations and did our assigned job for the first two hours, and then after break, we met our guide who checked our names off on a list and brought a bunch of us up the stairs to Single Toys. This is a shipping department where single orders are packed up and prepared for shipping. It was pretty easy to switch our thinking from the receiving process to the shipping process, and for the rest of the day we worked at our stations making boxes and packing orders. All in all, we enjoyed the day. It was a nice change from the jobs we have been doing for the past weeks. And we found out at the end of the day that it’s a permanent change. So from now on we are working in Outbound. The best part about this is that we now get to start a half hour later in the morning.

The one big unknown is how this affects our release date. Oh well, it is what it is. We were hoping to get done early next week, but if we don’t, I guess we will just have a little bit more money coming into our bank account. And the 23rd (the latest we could be released) is only a little over a week away. :)

One Year!

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 41, Low 17)

Today marks the milestone of one year of fulltime rv living! It was one year ago today that we pulled out of the driveway for the final time. We were very happy to have nice weather to get packed up and move to our temporary location in Catskill, NY.

 

It was so exciting to get settled in our spot and know that we no longer had to maneuver ourselves back into the driveway.

 

 

It has been a whirlwind year. After Harry’s retirement in January, we headed south as quickly as possible. We didn’t quite beat the winter weather and our trip through PA and VA was a little cold and snowy. But we made tracks and made it to the warmer parts of the country…enjoying a few days in Savannah, GA on our way to Jacksonville, FL.

 

 

 

 

 

We spent the month of February in Jacksonville. We had a lot of fun visiting with Harry’s sister, Linda and seeing a few of the sights, including a couple trips to St. Augustine.

 

 

Unfortunately, Harry was already feeling the effects of a hernia so we weren’t able to be as active as we would have liked to have been. He was pretty limited in the amount of walking he was able to do. One of my favorite activities (and Harry’s longest excursion) was on a nature walk in Willison, FL, which was our stop for the month of March.

 

April was our craziest and busiest month. We had already registered our vehicles through SD, but we still had to make a trip there in person to get our drivers licenses and complete the process of becoming residents. We left Florida on April 1st. We traveled north to PA to meet up with Heartland friends for a campout the second week of April and then went over to SD and back to NY by May 4th. We traveled 3,181 miles in the month of April. Not an experience either of us plan to repeat if we can help it! Over the entire year, we put 16,777 miles on the truck and spent $5,558.98 on diesel fuel, which I don’t think is too bad considering the truck is our only vehicle.

 

From early May to early September, we were settled at what has become our “home base” in NY. I like it because it is only ten minutes from my sister’s house. It is also a good starting point for visiting other members of our family, although we didn’t do too much of that last summer as Harry did end up having surgery in late May to repair the hernia.

 

And from early September to the present, we have been at our present location in Campbellsville KY and working for the first time at Amazon for the holiday season.

 

 

Do we miss having a house? Not one bit. (With one small disclaimer for an extreme dislike of being in an rv during severe storms, which I have already shared.) We love the space and floorplan of our rv and it sure feels like home. I do find that we have to work a bit harder to keep it picked up as clutter seems to pile up pretty easily. But I seem to remember sometimes having similar issues in the house, so I don’t think that is limited to fulltime living only. Although there is maintenance involved with having an rv, Harry doesn’t miss the upkeep required with a house – like mowing lawns, loading the pellet stove for heat, carrying bags of salt down to the basement and snowblowing the driveway!

Have we had problems? Of course…like a water leak on Christmas Day 2012, a faulty water pump that had to be replaced, the spring in our slide topper broke in Williston FL, an air conditioner leak in July, and most recently the thermostat in our water heater went. But things also stopped working when we had a house…and it’s just as inconvenient when it happens in your home no matter what kind of home you are in at the time. Overall, it’s been exactly what we expected…and hoped for…, and we are loving our life in our home on wheels.

We are looking forward to Year #2!!

Hoping For a Phone Call!

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 36, Low 23)

Last week on Thursday, we were super excited to get an automated phone call from Amazon informing us that our mandatory overtime for Friday had been cancelled. Ahhh! Three days off in a row. We enjoyed them SO much. Now we are wondering whether we will be getting another phone call tomorrow. Officially our overtime is still on schedule, but we have heard of two other day shifts that had their overtime cancelled on Monday and Tuesday. But then last night one of our neighbors here in the campground did have his overtime shift of overtime. So, will we or won’t we?

The bigger question, of course, is when do we get done for good. A group of us went out for dinner last night to celebrate it being FRIDAY, and everyone in Inbound is hoping to be released next week. We’ve been told that emails should be going out sometime this week to give us the final details, and we will be so excited to know for sure. We have been working now at Amazon for just over three months, and we are definitely ready to call it a day and move on. It’s been good but we are ready. (After we are all done, I will do a summary of our thoughts about the whole experience.)

One thing we wanted to keep track of while we were here was our weight. We weighed ourselves the day before we started. I’d heard the stories of people losing ten, fifteen pounds working here and that would have been so nice. Nope, not me. But I’m not too disappointed. We have been eating out A LOT since we started into the overtime weeks. For example, this past work week, we ate out three of the four evenings. This morning, we both weighed ourselves, and I am down 2.2 pounds since September 8th. Harry is down 5 pounds exactly. So I guess we’ve done ok. I do feel like I am in really good shape now. I spend ten hours of the day walking, pushing heavy carts, crouching, lifting boxes, and I haven’t even been breaking a sweat. Harry has been doing a lot of carrying and lifting boxes, sometimes pretty heavy boxes. We both feel pretty good about how we’ve accomplished the jobs. But we’re still counting down the days!!

The weather has been cold, but that’s not news. Half the blogs I read are talking about the cold weather!! At least here it’s “normal” cold weather for us, and not what we would be experiencing up north. Here we get close to 40 in the afternoons, but at home the highs have been in the 20s. And soon we will be heading further south, where hopefully pretty soon it will be warming up! :)

Fingers crossed for only four more days to work!!

End of Mandatory Overtime

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 72, Low 51)

We left work on Tuesday, ready to enjoy our two days off. We did the usual necessities – shopping, laundry, etc. I was excited to get a few gifts ready to go, and today we headed over to the Post Office and mailed them out.

The weather was so gorgeous yesterday. I was so excited to be able to wear a t-shirt on our errands – in December. And this morning we had a thunderstorm go through while we were doing our shopping at Walmart. Another first for us.

We have been making plans for the first couple weeks after we are released. Both Harry and I have relatives in the Atlanta area so we have been in contact with them and are looking forward to getting together with them to celebrate the holidays. We have also been entertaining ourselves by playing the guessing game about when we will actually be given a release date. We started speculating about that again this afternoon when we received an automated call from Amazon informing us that tomorrow’s mandatory overtime has been cancelled for Inbound. So we are back on 40 hour weeks now. I’m assuming this is a permanent change because it doesn’t seem like there should be an increase in work for next week either. The big question now is, how long will they need us in Inbound at all? We would like to get at least one more week in. But we will be happy no matter what.

The number of work days we have left has just taken a downward jump…there may be as little as 8 work days left!!

Starting to Wind Down

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 50, Low 39)

The holiday weekend is over, and it was pretty uneventful in our little corner of the Amazon world. It is really evident that the Inbound peak is over. Both yesterday and today we were scraping for work to send down the receiving line. Today they even put people to work on replacing tape on the floor and sweeping up. We haven’t seen those types of jobs since maybe sometime back in October? I can’t even remember when for sure. Before we went to lunch this morning, we were so short on work (incoming product) that I was even wondering whether they were going to offer VTO. But nope, we managed to find enough around to keep the processes going until the end of the workday. Tomorrow.is our Friday and then we have two…count ‘em…TWO days off. We are really looking forward to that. Next week’s schedule is not yet up, but we’re wondering whether they aren’t going to be putting us back to 40 hour weeks already instead of the 50 hour week we were expecting.

The weather has taken a nice turn for the better. It was in the 50s today – I was comfortable in my shorts and t-shirt on the way home which was so awesome for December. We are looking at mid to high 50s on our two days off. Yes!! By the way, did I mention that we were looking forward to our days off? :)

AND…only 11 days left to work!! YAY!