Working on Sundays

Sunday is probably the best day for us to work at Amazon. It seems that Sunday is the one day during the week when most of the full time people have off and it makes it easier for us to get our work done. There is less competition for full carts to stow and there are more open bins in which to store the products from the carts since there aren't a lot of people competing for those bins. The Receiving department is responsible for off-loading the trucks that deliver the product, opening boxes and separating products, moving the products to a preparation area where people load the carts for stowing the products in the bins and record those products in the computer system for tracking all the way to the end of the process when products are shipped to customers. Our job is the stowing phase and every piece of merchandise gets scanned (by our hand held scanners) as we place it in a bin on the warehouse floor. There are certain rules to be followed while stowing products in these bins - i.e., only 3 different products can be stowed in any one bin, they can not stick out of the bin more than 2 inches, and similar products cannot be stowed in adjacent bins. There are other guidelines, but those are the main ones. The interesting part of our job is that once an item is stowed, it is in the computer and ready for a "picker" to come along and take the item out of the bin to fill an order. It is a real time system and very well designed so that any product in the warehouse can be found anywhere within seconds of when it is stowed.

Sorry I got off on that tangent, but the point I was trying to make was that there is less pressure on us on Sunday than any other day we work. The other days seem more like a scramble to find bins before other people stowing products find them, and a scramble back to the pick up area to get another cart to stow before the "easy" carts are taken. The easy carts are the ones with small products that are easy to fit into bins. The other good thing about Sundays is that we only have 3 more days to work before we get our 3 day weekend.

We have concluded that we don't like the east coast in the summer. It is raining again today, and the humidity is high as usual. We will be happy to return to the dry western states in the summer months. Also, even though it is a pretty state, Kentucky doesn't compare with the mountain states out west. We will still enjoy our time here and just make sure that the future direction will be west. There are many places we would still like to go in the east, but we are thinking maybe some time down the road we will return and do the northeast, but not for another couple years. It is fun to be thinking about where to go next and we feel lucky to have the flexibility to go anywhere we choose. That's about it for now...