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It’s the final day of Cornerstone!  I’m both happy and sad.

We finished up the last of the videos, oh thank goodness!  Then we filled out a bunch of paperwork.  There is so much paperwork here it’s unreal.  But that should be the last of it for a while.

We had pizza to “celebrate” our completion.  It was East of Chicago’s pizza which is ok but I would have preferred Marco’s.  It’s free so I didn’t complain.

Then I headed down to the floor.  My trainer wasn’t here today so I got sent down with another guy.  He had me work over in his area for a bit while he got his trainee settled in then we went over to my area.

They started me out doing some powerloading and recycler chute cleaning just to get them caught up because they were a bit swamped.  Once things calmed down they got me hooked up with a scanner and sent me into my truck.  The guy and also my area supervisor walked me through the loading process and got me going on loading.

Ok, here’s the proper way to load packages into a feeder (the truck).  First read the zip code, state and city on the sticker.  If the zip code is good for the feeder then you point the scanner over the barcode.  If the barcode was read ok the computer will give a confirmation beep and a green light will show on the finger scanner.  If not you’ll get one of two error beeps and a red light on the finger scanner.  One possible error is for an invalid bar code.  This is usually if you’re not careful and scan the wrong bar code although it is possible to have a bad barcode.  The other error is if you already scanned the box and it is just telling you that you have a duplicate scan.

Now it seems like a lot to do but you can do it all in just a few seconds once you get experience.  Right now as a newbie it takes me a while since I have to stop and check the zip codes on my wrist chart but one I get to learn them I’ll speed up a bunch.

Wadsworth is a really slow truck so when I ran out of packages which happened a lot the supervisor would have me pick up the slack where I could help out.  I’d do some recycler clearing, help load some steel, when things got backed up I’d jump in and do powerloading.

I’m really sore from today.  I had two powerloads that were just horrible.  I stacked 5 walls of almost nothing but dell computers in one trailer in under 10 minutes.  You could stack them 5 boxes wide and 5 boxes tall in the trailer so I bet there were over 100 boxes and each one weight about 50 pounds.  That just drains the hell out of you.

I did that for about three and a half hours today.  The shift ended and I closed up the truck and headed home.  Tomorrow I work almost a full day.  I actually have one last video I have to watch as part of my hazmat handling certification.  It’ll take about 30 minutes then I’ll be out on the floor.  I can’t wait.

Another day has gone by.  Day three wasn’t too bad.  Watched more videos, whoopee!, on safety and hazardous materials.  I’m a bit torn, on one side I’m glad I’m almost done with the videos but on the other side that means I’m going to have to start doing real work and I like getting paid to sit around all day!

The unloaders headed out to work while we loaders stayed in the classroom to get taught how to use the scanners.  The scanners that they use are pretty cool.  There are two parts to the scanners. 

The first is the computer part.  It’s about the size of your hand and has a LCD screen and a keypad on it.  Just think of it as a fancy PDA.  You strap that to your belt and for the most part never really touch it.

The second part is the actual barcode scanner.  It straps to two of your fingers and links up using a bluetooth wireless connection to the computer part.  All it does is fires out a red barcode scan about once every second and if it lines up with a barcode it’ll be read automatically.

So, after that training I got out on the floor and just schlepped around for the day.  I keep the recycler chute clean, did some steel and powerloaded in several trailers.  Basically, the normal scanner person just stands at the front of the trailer and scans each package as quickly as possible and then one or sometimes two others will load the packages for him/her.  They do this whenever a major load is coming down the conveyers.  There’s a little monitor in each area that shows how many packages has been sent to you since the beginning of the shift and also how many are incoming down the conveyer belts from the central sort.  The supervisor keeps an eye and when he sees a bunch incoming he’ll yell at people to head to wherever to help out.

I actually like powerloading.  I like the teamwork aspect of it since normally you spend all day in a trailer by yourself.  It’s nice to be able to help out one another and get to meet the other people working in the area.

So that’s what day three was like.