New Adventures In The Same Old Job

A couple of weeks ago my job at work changed. I’m no longer a frozen forklift. I took a two week vacation and when I got back there was a job posting up for a dry goods utility( Warm department). Having not had my fingers and toes go numb for a couple of weeks was really nice so I signed the bid. Much to my surprise I got it! I’m out of the freezer!  To quote Martin Luther King ” Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, Free at last!!”

The utility jobs are replacements workers if someone goes on vacation or calls in sick. It’s a job I’ve been avoiding for several years. The reason is I knew I would have to learn how to  receive. A job I’ve done at my last employer but didn’t really enjoy. The past couple of weeks I’ve been training to receive.

It turns out I’m pretty good at it, and I kind of like it. It gives me a chance to use my brain. They say that every time you learn something new you get a new wrinkle on your brain. Mine must look like a bowling ball( naw that’s to big… a pool ball… nope still to big, OK a BB, that’s about right).  I haven’t learned anything new in quite a while. The forklift job is pretty mindless. I turn on the computer on the lift, I scan a label on the pallet , take the pallet where the computer tells me to, put the pallet away scan the rack, repeat a couple hundred times a day! Pretty boring. It is a job however, that allows my mind to wander. It’s where I’ve thought up my best blogs.

I’ve picked up receiving pretty quickly. But it is very information intensive. I’m used to checking to make sure six or seven digit numbers are correct, but now I’m dealing with alpha-numeric numbers that can be as long as fifteen digits, sometimes they all look the same. I’m also dealing with drivers that come in so I need to be a people person, which I am not!

The computer system we use is a home grown system and sometimes it seems overly complicated. For example to print out the lables, purchase order, and the sheets for the  guys who actually stack the product I have to do this. Enter the  p.o. number tap F9, tab over enter door number tap F7, now tap F10 type ” O” for open hit enter, tap F10 twice, type ” P ” for print then “A” for all then press enter then tap F3 and then F8 the paperwork is now printing. Seems very complicated in this day of point and click. Especially when the program is based off of Windows. It gets more complicated if there is a problem.

My main concern in learning all this is that my brain is going to get full. I’m currently on an information overload. My brain is looking for places to store it all but seems to be having space problems. I’m afraid if it doesn’t get saved soon my brain is going to have to start overwriting files and I’ll start forgetting important stuff,  like my name, or how to use the big boy potty! Or worse yet it won’t overwrite and my head will just keep getting bigger until it pops, spewing marshmallow fluff all over the place. That’s pretty much what my brain is made of.