Dear Lord my feet really hurt. I know I will get used to it after a few days. If not, we are picking up some of those nifty comfort inserts for my shoes this weekend. I really doubt it will help, but I doubt it could hurt. After today, I think I have done about 60-70% of everything my job entails at least once. I spent the majority of the day walking between machines watching the DVDs flow through the machinery. In a given shift, the peak performance (ie mythical) of the line we were on is supposed to be 45000 DVDs. That is roughly 4k an hour. With the exception of the last hour there, I would say we did fairly well, maybe 3-3.5k/hour. The last hour everything seemed to need to be replaced and there were a few random problems that sprung up, one of which I kinda had a hand in.
I did, however, ask a few people if they knew anything about the job we were not supposed to talk about. Oddly, I got about the same responce from all of them. Occasionally, coupons are packaged with DVDs (like holiday specials) and since some retailers end up with them and some don't (keep in mind we produce for all over the nation, not just this little corner of the world) we are not supposed to talk about them. But all of them also brought up dead artwork (labels, booklets, stickers) and the fact that we are not supposed to take it form the plant...as if that had anything to do with what I had asked about. I had been planning on talking to Human Resources about it, but they have been proving more and more what they say means very little, so I am not going to bother with it. I think I will just decide to have intentions of what I will and won't say, and try to keep to it.
So, going with the say whatever I want take on this, lets talk about the details of my position. When I hit the Sony DADC booth they handed me a little piece of paper detailing the benefits for the new seasonal full-time position they were offering. In case I have not mentioned it before, seasonal full-time means working as a normal full-time position until December 31, then we are laid off until July, rince repeat. I thought it was fairly ideal since I could work my ass off half the year and hit school the other half. Now the benefits: only $9/hour (+$.35 for overnight people), they said they were only hiring for overnights, we were supposed to get full dental, medical, vision, etc, $100/month if we had perfect attendance, and paid holidays. At the interview, they broke out the same sheet, said it was now $10/hour to start and would go up to $13/hour after training, there are no benefits, and the attendance bonus was being pushed to the end of the term and they were not sure of the amount, and the paid holidays were also being pushed in with the end of term amount. Yesterday we were told (amidst a bit of amusing drama that I will probably never post about) that the $100/month thing was just us misunderstanding the fact that we got holiday pay...hard to look at a bulleted list of benefits with "$100/month for perfect attendance" and get "holiday pay comes at the end of the term but only if you stay the whole term".
All of this kinda made us wonder what else will be changed before things are said and done. They keep using the fact that this is a pilot program replacing their work with temp services (and we make way more than the temps do) so they are still deciding what is going to happen. But it is making us a little nervous. Now to be fair, we will actually be making more per month even considering the fact that the $100/month is toast. Now, that does not take into consideration how much insurance would be outside of work, but there is a possibility that I can get in Erin's plan this fall when she is teaching at ISU.
