Working girl

Sorry I’ve been in touch lately. I started my new job a few weeks ago. Can you believe I get up at 5AM now?! Anyway, I was so relieved to finally get a job. Guess what. I hate it. Well, the past weeks have been better. I started off Tuesday morning with a 5AM alarm. Anyone that knows me at all knows I am NOT a morning person. Since I’ve not had a job I sleep until 10AM most days so my body was not diggin’ this 5AM thing. Tuesday was a wet morning. Let me rephrase that, it was a “need a canoe to get to work day.” Since I cycle to everywhere, I layer up with all my rain gear and hit the road. The water was so deep in some places I couldn’t ride next to the curb—I had to ride in the middle of the street. Fortunately there aren’t many cars out at 5:45AM.

Do you remember that game show from the 80’s called “Supermarket Sweep”? My job isn’t that unlike it. I am what they call a “Dot Comer” for a chain called Tesco. Lots of people buy their groceries online here. I pick their orders. Easy enough right? Wrong! I have a little computer on a “trolley” that I push around the store. It tells me where to go and what bin to put the items in on my trolley. Now, if I had a realistic amount of time that might be nice. There is a clock on the computer telling you how you are doing in your allotted time frame. Blue means you are picking at an excellent rate, green is good, orange is slow and red is…well you get the point. My first day out on my own I couldn’t get out of the red. Our Tesco is HUGE, all the product packaging looks different, the trolley gets SUPER heavy when it loaded down, all the wheels turn and rotate making it damn near impossible to control! As a matter of fact I was pushing it down the wine aisle one day picking a wine order and a man said I was driving it like I had been drinking the wine. I wish! Anyway, there are 50 of us Dot Comer’s and there are always customers in the store and cages of stock and employees restocking. It like pushing a heavy cart through an obstacle coarse on time limit. Sometimes items aren’t on the shelf. We get “dinged” against our goals if we substitute it but there is no way we can look for it and still stay in our time frame. It’s a no win situation and it was killing me. I came home everyday really discouraged.

By the time Saturday rolled around I was exhausted. Some jerk in the bread department chewed me out for being in his way. Here I am, in a new country, where I can’t find a job. Then when I finally find one and I am no good at it. I came home after my first week and bawled my eyes out.

The past 2 weeks have been better. I’ve learned some of the tricks to make things good faster. I still don’t like it but at least I’m not in tears over it…for now.