AlanBarber.Org
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Working at UPS - Day 3
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.
on 10/21/2004 at 07:07 PM