Berck is spending the weekend filling out job applications and printing out resumes. Last summer I was doing this; now he gets to. I guess I’ll have to do so again soon as well.

I took last Friday and Monday off so we could drive down to Mobile for the weekend. As it was, we were so busy at work that I had an hour an a half of overtime week-before-last…even with only working four days! We were so busy again this week that I got a full forty-hour week…again with only working four days. On Thursday I was walking around the warehouse trying to solve Daily Order Discrepancies, my last task of the day, and I just felt so tired. I pulled out my watch and saw it was almost 8 p.m. I’d arrived at work at 8:30 a.m. No wonder I was tired.

We had a reprieve from the heat this last week. On Wednesday the high was 80. The HIGH! It was so nice to work in a temperate climate for a change. The weather stayed nice until late in the day on Friday when it started to get hot again. Oh well.

All of the college kids that we hired the summer to build shelves and move stuff we also trained to stock. The last several weeks we’ve hardly moved anything, we’ve been so behind on pulling or inchecking or stocking. If they stock, the incheckers can pull orders, and we only have ten-hour days instead of twelve-hour ones. But we are now consistently behind on our moving goals.

So my boss hired a bunch of temp workers to do what the people on my shift are supposed to be doing. This last week I spent a good bit of time training and supervising the temps on tearing down shelves and moving. When I wasn’t pulling, that is. My boss has hired four new pullers in the last two weeks as well. But we can’t seem to keep people for very long this summer (hmm, I wonder why?) But new people are so much slower than someone with experience.

I’ll probably be pulling again this week. The last couple of weeks I’ve pulled ahead on the departments we were planning to move that day, only to have nothing happen, because by then the powers that be realized how far behind we were for the day and put a stop to all moving so everyone could stock (and I could keep on pulling). At least my pulling times don’t count anymore. That makes world of difference from working last year.