Back to normal today, no taking text messages of a congratulatory note or replying to Facebook messages from people graciously remembering my birthday. Just another stepping stone across the river of life as it flows along towards the ocean of eternity. Another program in the long running serial of life. I don’t think my life would rate very well! Reading War and Peace or a magazine on how to mate Llamas would be more exciting I think.
However I am happy to be here and intend to be around for a lot longer yet.
It was a quiet birthday. I was able to stay in bed for a while and try to sleep off the cold I have which is something I almost never do. I am usually up due to the early morning departures of the rest of the household and my eagerness to get to grips with what is happening in the world via the internet.
I did have to ring Optus about our dodgy phone line and I have the feeling I may have been talking to someone in India when I got through due to the phony American accent, interspersed with a slight vocal dent of unknown origin coming down the phone to me. There is a technician coming on Thursday sometime between 8am and 7pm! They really don’t give you much of a chance to work your day out around them do they?
Then it was off to work. I wondered if the supervisor would cut me some slack on my birthday, give me an easy ride and place me in the small parcel section where I can idle away at my own pace and take the greetings of anyone who may find out that I am officially a year older.
No such luck! it was possibly the worst available outcome with the Bar Code Sorter being the weapon of choice to try my patience at 2pm. We wer’nt just slothing it in the Devil’s Den either, it was full on! They were running mail that was to be sequenced on another machine after it had been processed on the BCS and as a result the mail was only coming out of selected stackers on diagonally opposite sides of the machine!
I was the swinger, and I mean that in the most honest sense of the word, trying to help the ladies on either side come to grips with the amount of mail spewing from their respective stackers and not having much success in my endeavours.
An extra hand would have helped but asking our supervisor for another body elicits a similar reaction to asking if you can sleep with his mother!
In any case he was in a meeting with our erstwhile facility commander and we had to struggle through on our own. Anyone who believes mail sorters are bludgers most of the time have never had to work on a mail processing machine going full tilt with a badly set up mail distribution system.
By the time our supervisor returned we had finished anyway and I told him in such a scenario that we faced yesterday we needed and extra person to help or the whole stacker system needed to be redesigned. Of course he agreed with me after the fact but getting him to do something about it when the bullets are firing would be another thing altogether.
So it wasn’t a pleasant opening to my “birthday” day at the MC but things bubbled along well enough after that. No real hassles or issues. 90 productive minutes in the parcel section after 4pm and finishing off the most turbulent part of the day on tipping; that is tipping mail bags from street posting boxes into our letter cancelling machine and helping cull out the product that won’t go through, even though the machine is designed to do just that.
Managed to sit down for the last hour and that was a quiet enough way to round out the day.
So that was it for my 42nd birthday. I am now the same age as Elvis when he died and as a life long follower of the “King” it gobsmacks me that I have actually equalled him in age. If I stay off the fried food and mountain of prescription drugs that he managed to devour with such intensity then I should make it a lot further than he did.
So, another day dawns and I imagine it will be nothing but the same old tune playing and the revolving door will keep swinging with the same old creak sounding. But you wouldn’t be dead for quids!
Have a great day.
However I am happy to be here and intend to be around for a lot longer yet.
It was a quiet birthday. I was able to stay in bed for a while and try to sleep off the cold I have which is something I almost never do. I am usually up due to the early morning departures of the rest of the household and my eagerness to get to grips with what is happening in the world via the internet.
I did have to ring Optus about our dodgy phone line and I have the feeling I may have been talking to someone in India when I got through due to the phony American accent, interspersed with a slight vocal dent of unknown origin coming down the phone to me. There is a technician coming on Thursday sometime between 8am and 7pm! They really don’t give you much of a chance to work your day out around them do they?
Then it was off to work. I wondered if the supervisor would cut me some slack on my birthday, give me an easy ride and place me in the small parcel section where I can idle away at my own pace and take the greetings of anyone who may find out that I am officially a year older.
No such luck! it was possibly the worst available outcome with the Bar Code Sorter being the weapon of choice to try my patience at 2pm. We wer’nt just slothing it in the Devil’s Den either, it was full on! They were running mail that was to be sequenced on another machine after it had been processed on the BCS and as a result the mail was only coming out of selected stackers on diagonally opposite sides of the machine!
I was the swinger, and I mean that in the most honest sense of the word, trying to help the ladies on either side come to grips with the amount of mail spewing from their respective stackers and not having much success in my endeavours.
An extra hand would have helped but asking our supervisor for another body elicits a similar reaction to asking if you can sleep with his mother!
In any case he was in a meeting with our erstwhile facility commander and we had to struggle through on our own. Anyone who believes mail sorters are bludgers most of the time have never had to work on a mail processing machine going full tilt with a badly set up mail distribution system.
By the time our supervisor returned we had finished anyway and I told him in such a scenario that we faced yesterday we needed and extra person to help or the whole stacker system needed to be redesigned. Of course he agreed with me after the fact but getting him to do something about it when the bullets are firing would be another thing altogether.
So it wasn’t a pleasant opening to my “birthday” day at the MC but things bubbled along well enough after that. No real hassles or issues. 90 productive minutes in the parcel section after 4pm and finishing off the most turbulent part of the day on tipping; that is tipping mail bags from street posting boxes into our letter cancelling machine and helping cull out the product that won’t go through, even though the machine is designed to do just that.
Managed to sit down for the last hour and that was a quiet enough way to round out the day.
So that was it for my 42nd birthday. I am now the same age as Elvis when he died and as a life long follower of the “King” it gobsmacks me that I have actually equalled him in age. If I stay off the fried food and mountain of prescription drugs that he managed to devour with such intensity then I should make it a lot further than he did.
So, another day dawns and I imagine it will be nothing but the same old tune playing and the revolving door will keep swinging with the same old creak sounding. But you wouldn’t be dead for quids!
Have a great day.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 