Saturday! Always great to get here. Slept in. No hassle to get anything done quickly. The weekend is off to a good start.
I always feel really zonkered on Saturday mornings and it doesn’t make a lot of sense as to why. Maybe it is just the release from the working week hitting me and the stress of putting up with Australia Post 5 days in a row.
Yesterday was just an average sort of day. Walked in at 2pm and was rostered on the Bar Code Sorter, a mmonotonous, repetitious, mind numbing machine that rattles all day like on oncoming freight train. It reads the bar codes on the letters and sends them off to a stacker which corresponds to a posties run. You take the mail out of the stackers and turn and put them in a grey tray which is on a frame called a “rocket launcher” because all the grey trays in the frame sit on an angle making it look like the old “Stalin Organ” rocket launchers the Soviets used in WW2. Creative thinking from someone at AP there!
These frames run along the side of the machine and the mail officers walk up and down between it and the rocket launchers and it is sort of like being enclosed in a WW1 trench! Wonder what would happen if you stuck your head above the parapet?!
Now I normally don’t mind working on the machine for a couple of hours although it can be really boring and you are forever watching the clock whilst you are on it counting down the minutes until the break or tie off time but yesterday it was terrible!
The moment it started and the first few letters came out I knew it was going to be a trial. Spotlight had sent through three ULDS of mail. For anyone who doesn’t know that is a lot! And they were thick and coming out in runs very quickly! Now the machine can force you to work swiftly at the best of times but when the mail is like this you have to put it up a gear because you can’t keep up with it otherwise. The grey trays fill up quickly and we have to clear them out of the frames and replace them and label them so when we have thick mail it is twice as bad.
When the first letters came through I wanted to go home knowing what was in store for the next hour and a half however I soon got myself into gear and my little Vietnamese partner and I got into a good routine and although you could not say it was at any time enjoyable we got through it without pulling too much hair out.
You know the office staff and others attached to the Mail Centre are always slinging muck at mail officers with the usual derogatory remarks about laziness etc. They think it doesn’t get back to us but we hear about it then they wonder why we think they are fools. I would love to see them on the Bar Code Sorter for two hours when it is putting through hundreds of letters a minute and see how they go. You can’t be lazy when you are operating the BCS. It doesn’t let you!
After that things got a bit easier with a bit of parcel sorting but had it a bit difficult again after dinner tipping mail bags into our letter canceller for two hours. Got through that okay though then the usual slide towards the bell, sorting small letters by hand till knock off time which is an easier way to finish the day.
So now it’s Saturday and I have promised Linda I will weed the garden so I can hear it calling my name now. She has a friend here at the moment so I can afford to get away and blog for a little while but I will finish up now and get to work outside. Hope everyone has a great weekend.
I always feel really zonkered on Saturday mornings and it doesn’t make a lot of sense as to why. Maybe it is just the release from the working week hitting me and the stress of putting up with Australia Post 5 days in a row.
Yesterday was just an average sort of day. Walked in at 2pm and was rostered on the Bar Code Sorter, a mmonotonous, repetitious, mind numbing machine that rattles all day like on oncoming freight train. It reads the bar codes on the letters and sends them off to a stacker which corresponds to a posties run. You take the mail out of the stackers and turn and put them in a grey tray which is on a frame called a “rocket launcher” because all the grey trays in the frame sit on an angle making it look like the old “Stalin Organ” rocket launchers the Soviets used in WW2. Creative thinking from someone at AP there!
These frames run along the side of the machine and the mail officers walk up and down between it and the rocket launchers and it is sort of like being enclosed in a WW1 trench! Wonder what would happen if you stuck your head above the parapet?!
Now I normally don’t mind working on the machine for a couple of hours although it can be really boring and you are forever watching the clock whilst you are on it counting down the minutes until the break or tie off time but yesterday it was terrible!
The moment it started and the first few letters came out I knew it was going to be a trial. Spotlight had sent through three ULDS of mail. For anyone who doesn’t know that is a lot! And they were thick and coming out in runs very quickly! Now the machine can force you to work swiftly at the best of times but when the mail is like this you have to put it up a gear because you can’t keep up with it otherwise. The grey trays fill up quickly and we have to clear them out of the frames and replace them and label them so when we have thick mail it is twice as bad.
When the first letters came through I wanted to go home knowing what was in store for the next hour and a half however I soon got myself into gear and my little Vietnamese partner and I got into a good routine and although you could not say it was at any time enjoyable we got through it without pulling too much hair out.
You know the office staff and others attached to the Mail Centre are always slinging muck at mail officers with the usual derogatory remarks about laziness etc. They think it doesn’t get back to us but we hear about it then they wonder why we think they are fools. I would love to see them on the Bar Code Sorter for two hours when it is putting through hundreds of letters a minute and see how they go. You can’t be lazy when you are operating the BCS. It doesn’t let you!
After that things got a bit easier with a bit of parcel sorting but had it a bit difficult again after dinner tipping mail bags into our letter canceller for two hours. Got through that okay though then the usual slide towards the bell, sorting small letters by hand till knock off time which is an easier way to finish the day.
So now it’s Saturday and I have promised Linda I will weed the garden so I can hear it calling my name now. She has a friend here at the moment so I can afford to get away and blog for a little while but I will finish up now and get to work outside. Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 