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Tales of the Vaguely Useless
Jun. 16th, 2004 12:33 amSo, yes. My first day on the job, and I did next to squat.
That's because the woman who's supposed to be training me is frankly too busy to train me, and the supervisor who hired me floats around the office, also presumably too busy to train me, but managing not to look as busy.
Natalie, the nice woman I'm working with, is a hoot and a half, but going insane with work.
The company is Erb Transport, and they do food delivery, which is a fast-paced and exciting world. Or fast-paced, anyway. Everything is supposed to be somewhere yesterday, and it's always late and there always seems to be problems with everything. Which is where Nat comes in. She solves all the problems. In an ideal world, anyway.
They're backlogged six ways 'til Sunday, but I had nothing to do, which made it even worse for me. I didn't understand a damned thing that was going on, or perhaps ten or fifteen percent of what was happening. It's a completely different world, and when I fucked up even using the fax machine it was all I could do not to throw up my hands and hit my head against the nearest wall. In my defense, they have this weird-ass photocopier/fax-machine that prints out confirmations upside-down, so I thought the fax hadn't gone through properly, and I sent it twice. It wasn't huge, but it was just the cap to a long day of frustrations.
I kept trying to teach myself how to do things, but there was nothing for me to learn. There was no manual (the one manual they had was from 1990 :P), and there was so much new jargon that I was unfamiliar with that my head spun. And all the while I kept feeling horribly inadequate for not understanding everything right then and there and mastering my new job on the spot (not that anyone knows what my job actually is, and my supervisor hasn't even told me what it is, in so many words. I wish he'd actually define my duties for me...) and pitching in and helping people.
So, yeah. I kept trying to tell myself that it wasn't my fault, that I didn't suck, that I had been hired yesterday afternoon and told to come in the next day, and that Natalie had been given no warning at all that I was coming in and therefore had nothing prepared for me. It didn't really help much.
So, I spent most of the day trying to teach myself an unfamiliar database with completely arbitrary commands in a system in which I don't even have my own login on a computer without a mouse. Please kill me now.
I learned the term OS&D today, which means Overage, Shortage and Damage. This is one of the departments I'll be reporting to. Don't ask me what the other departments are, because I don't know. They haven't told me yet, although apparently the guy's name is Robert. *sigh* Natalie is OS&D. Oh, and then I discovered more fun terms like "skid" and "pallet" and "CSD" and "BRD report." Don't ask me what those are, because I don't know. "Skids" and "pallets" are, as far as I can tell, either containers or smallish platforms used to load several cartons of goods at once on a truck. So you'll ask a driver how many "pallets" he has on his truck, or how many "skids." O_o
Am muy confused.
Oh, and let's not forget everyone's favourite, the "Bill of Lading." Yes, another word I've never heard of. Apparently it's a type of shipping document. Then there are the p.o.'s, which are one of the few things I was familiar with, and the "load stop" (still don't know what that is), and any number of other terms which will doubtless haunt me this week.
Anyway, everyone was really nice with me, so that was good. I got introduced all around by Nat, who seemed genuinely appalled at our supervisor's lack of hospitality toward me. Maybe he's still suspicious of me because of my good C.V. (*sigh* Is it my fault the rest of them didn't go to University? Come on!), but everyone else was friendly and welcoming, although naturally everything is so busy around there that there wasn't much time to get to know each other. That, and it works on a shift schedule, so no one has exactly the same lunch hour, which is too bad.
I start again at 8:00 tomorrow morning. I can only hope they'll have found something for me to learn. :P
In other, even more depressing news, my uncle Tony has taken a turn for the worse. After months of crippling radiation therapy, they declared that they had beaten back his lung cancer and "bought" him two years.
Then over Memorial Day weekend he was admitted into the hospital with what seemed to be pneumonia-like symptoms. They treated him and released him a few days later, but he relapsed and now he's in the hospital again.
The cancer has metastasized to his other lung. They say he has maybe another two weeks to live, and his primary physician agrees. Of course, they're also saying that it's possible he might last up to six months, but it's doubtful. Two weeks is the most likely scenario.
I spoke with my cousin Nora for the first time on the phone today, and I promised her I'd get in touch with my mother. I finally tracked down the number for my mother in Tours and woke her up at 2:30 in the morning with the news that her only brother and the last remaining member of her European family in North America is going to die, possibly before she can even get back from France. I hated doing it. I almost wished I could leave her in blessed ignorance to enjoy her trip without this added weight, but I knew that was horribly selfish and I knew she'd want to know.
My Uncle Tony has, to me, always been a voice on the phone. I've now met him a total of twice in my life. He's the man in the photographs, the shaking voice on the phone who tries to speak French to me. He's the man my mother calls "Hello" which my father and I always tease her about (it was her first English word, and she didn't know what it meant). She calls him "Sweetie" on the phone, and I've heard her cry because of him, because she knew him when he was beautiful and strong and young, long before he was broken.
That's because the woman who's supposed to be training me is frankly too busy to train me, and the supervisor who hired me floats around the office, also presumably too busy to train me, but managing not to look as busy.
Natalie, the nice woman I'm working with, is a hoot and a half, but going insane with work.
The company is Erb Transport, and they do food delivery, which is a fast-paced and exciting world. Or fast-paced, anyway. Everything is supposed to be somewhere yesterday, and it's always late and there always seems to be problems with everything. Which is where Nat comes in. She solves all the problems. In an ideal world, anyway.
They're backlogged six ways 'til Sunday, but I had nothing to do, which made it even worse for me. I didn't understand a damned thing that was going on, or perhaps ten or fifteen percent of what was happening. It's a completely different world, and when I fucked up even using the fax machine it was all I could do not to throw up my hands and hit my head against the nearest wall. In my defense, they have this weird-ass photocopier/fax-machine that prints out confirmations upside-down, so I thought the fax hadn't gone through properly, and I sent it twice. It wasn't huge, but it was just the cap to a long day of frustrations.
I kept trying to teach myself how to do things, but there was nothing for me to learn. There was no manual (the one manual they had was from 1990 :P), and there was so much new jargon that I was unfamiliar with that my head spun. And all the while I kept feeling horribly inadequate for not understanding everything right then and there and mastering my new job on the spot (not that anyone knows what my job actually is, and my supervisor hasn't even told me what it is, in so many words. I wish he'd actually define my duties for me...) and pitching in and helping people.
So, yeah. I kept trying to tell myself that it wasn't my fault, that I didn't suck, that I had been hired yesterday afternoon and told to come in the next day, and that Natalie had been given no warning at all that I was coming in and therefore had nothing prepared for me. It didn't really help much.
So, I spent most of the day trying to teach myself an unfamiliar database with completely arbitrary commands in a system in which I don't even have my own login on a computer without a mouse. Please kill me now.
I learned the term OS&D today, which means Overage, Shortage and Damage. This is one of the departments I'll be reporting to. Don't ask me what the other departments are, because I don't know. They haven't told me yet, although apparently the guy's name is Robert. *sigh* Natalie is OS&D. Oh, and then I discovered more fun terms like "skid" and "pallet" and "CSD" and "BRD report." Don't ask me what those are, because I don't know. "Skids" and "pallets" are, as far as I can tell, either containers or smallish platforms used to load several cartons of goods at once on a truck. So you'll ask a driver how many "pallets" he has on his truck, or how many "skids." O_o
Am muy confused.
Oh, and let's not forget everyone's favourite, the "Bill of Lading." Yes, another word I've never heard of. Apparently it's a type of shipping document. Then there are the p.o.'s, which are one of the few things I was familiar with, and the "load stop" (still don't know what that is), and any number of other terms which will doubtless haunt me this week.
Anyway, everyone was really nice with me, so that was good. I got introduced all around by Nat, who seemed genuinely appalled at our supervisor's lack of hospitality toward me. Maybe he's still suspicious of me because of my good C.V. (*sigh* Is it my fault the rest of them didn't go to University? Come on!), but everyone else was friendly and welcoming, although naturally everything is so busy around there that there wasn't much time to get to know each other. That, and it works on a shift schedule, so no one has exactly the same lunch hour, which is too bad.
I start again at 8:00 tomorrow morning. I can only hope they'll have found something for me to learn. :P
In other, even more depressing news, my uncle Tony has taken a turn for the worse. After months of crippling radiation therapy, they declared that they had beaten back his lung cancer and "bought" him two years.
Then over Memorial Day weekend he was admitted into the hospital with what seemed to be pneumonia-like symptoms. They treated him and released him a few days later, but he relapsed and now he's in the hospital again.
The cancer has metastasized to his other lung. They say he has maybe another two weeks to live, and his primary physician agrees. Of course, they're also saying that it's possible he might last up to six months, but it's doubtful. Two weeks is the most likely scenario.
I spoke with my cousin Nora for the first time on the phone today, and I promised her I'd get in touch with my mother. I finally tracked down the number for my mother in Tours and woke her up at 2:30 in the morning with the news that her only brother and the last remaining member of her European family in North America is going to die, possibly before she can even get back from France. I hated doing it. I almost wished I could leave her in blessed ignorance to enjoy her trip without this added weight, but I knew that was horribly selfish and I knew she'd want to know.
My Uncle Tony has, to me, always been a voice on the phone. I've now met him a total of twice in my life. He's the man in the photographs, the shaking voice on the phone who tries to speak French to me. He's the man my mother calls "Hello" which my father and I always tease her about (it was her first English word, and she didn't know what it meant). She calls him "Sweetie" on the phone, and I've heard her cry because of him, because she knew him when he was beautiful and strong and young, long before he was broken.
