Schneider Foods

This past week has been rather eventful. It began with teaching myself how to drive standard. I had absolutely NO idea how. I didn't even know that you had to have the clutch in to start the car, but I soon realized that. The first couple... hours.... were quite sketchy. There wasn't so much of the car-jolting/whiplash-rendering experiences, but everything was a bit sketchy - to say the least. I'm surprised the clutch still works. Anyways. It was a Monday and I had to work the next morning at 6am and my parents are gone to Oregon so I had to teach myself. I ended up going out with my brother-in-law for an hour or so after dinner and that was good. He told me a lot of the basics that I didn't know such as - "even though you're focusing on shifting... don't forget to use your signal!!". haha. I was driving home from wherever we were driving and I get to a stop light. I was first in line and everything had been going pretty smoothly. Anyways, the light turns green and I stalled three times in a row.... then the light turned red and nobody made it through... oops. Brian just laughed at me. Yup... I think that's about the end of that.
On Tuesday I started working at Schneider Foods. I work in packaging and so I pretty much package sausages all day long. I wake up at 5am and go to work at 5:10. My shift starts at 6am and ends at 2:30. It sucks because I have to go to bed at 9pm, but the people I work with are awesome. I won't even explain what I do because it won't make sense. I could do pretty much all the different jobs right away after 5-10 minutes of starting, but I could not get the labelling at all! I sucked at it. Whoever was labelling with me would have to do three packages for every one of mine. You have to do everything so fast because the machine just keeps on going and going and it's ridiculous. Honestly... yeah yeah how hard can it be to package sausages etc, but you have to be super quick. For the first three days I could not label at all. Oh yeah, this week is my training so I have a 'shadow'. Pretty much this woman named Bridget has been hanging out with me watching and showing me what to do etc. She filled in all the pouches I missed and showed me how to link the smokies etc. Labelled all the pouches except for the 9 or 10 I would do. Haha. Bridget's pretty cool. I like her at least.
Every morning I get to work at about 5:30-5:40am. Almost everyone is there at about that time. If I'm cold then I make myself some tea in the lunchroom and sit with all the men, but if I'm not then I go hang out with the ladies in the locker room. It's always fun in there. The women complain about menopause and hormones and working etc and I just sit there and laugh. At 5:50 we head down and don our working garbs. We all suit up in our steel-toed rubber boots, blue smocks, ear plugs, our hard hats, a hairnet, and doctors masks. As soon as we enter the packaging section we all have to wash our hands and then we put on cotton gloves (we work in a giant freezer), latex gloves overtop and sleeve guards. And then we work. If we touch anything other than the meat products we are working with we have to dip our hands in iodine or go wash them again. It's pretty fun. At lunch they provide all the meat and bread you could want, but after working with smokies all day you aren't too excited about eatting them. Oh well. Yup, so that's pretty much what my summer will consist of. Oh, and I found out that I work Tuesday to Saturday... pretty lame. Oh well, I get off early so that's good. 2:30 isn't too bad. Hurray for going to bed at 9am!