My first English job experience

Walking down the high street, while doing my lunch time shopping, I realized something. Standing in a queue at a store I looked at the person working there and in a way admired them.

The thought that every single day I come to work, I would have exactly the same routine ahead of me. Same mundane tasks repeated over and over again. Maybe you do get a bit of variation, but a day of cleaning, followed by a day of shelf stacking, followed by a day of cashier work, and then back to cleaning, still doesn’t sound too appealing, if it even works this way.

Admittedly the closest I have ever came to such work was helping at my parents music store when I was a kid. I honestly disliked those days - dusting shelves and stacking cds and casettes. Mostly cleaning this and cleaning that, and you didn’t even get to play your music as due to my taste it might scare away the customers (and admittedly it probably would have).

Later on in life during a Christmas visit to England, just before I moved permanently, I have worked at some kind of post sorting, magazine packing warehouse. In many ways it was a sad experience, not because of the manual labour, but more due to the painful lack of efficiency and organisation. I guess I am the kind of person who cannot look at an obviously inefficient process and not even try to better it.

The packaging process involved the following steps: preparing the envelope, putting the magazine inside, inserting some other papers, lacking the envelope, and finally placing the address sticker. I was in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and the company was massively behind, which was how me and my sister got the job along side quite a few other temps. Even with all the extra hands they still had over 12 hour shifts, and gave extra hours to any temp that would take it.

Already during the first half a day me and my sister have quickly realized that considering we were grouped into 5 people tables, we could process the magazines a lot quicker if one person did only one action rather than try to do all the steps from start to finish. A the end of the day our table processed a lot more and a lot quicker than some of he other ones.

What surprised us though, was that instead of this being noticed we were not asked to come back after the third day. What it came down to was that the supervisors had people sign their name when they took batches of address stickers. Considering neither me nor my sister did the stickers at our table, not for most of the day at least, we were not considered efficient enough!

I could understand the motivation for everyone doing every step - it probably would ease the monotony of the work. When you’re just sliding magazines into the envelopes it does verge on a state of hypnotic automation. However we were not full time employees, we were temps to supposedly clear out the backlog of deliveries as quickly as possible.

That was just one example of their disorganisation, just to mention one more, one of the days we spent over four hours doing nothing - just sitting at empty tables, because they were waiting for the address stickers to arrive. Not that we might have been doing everything up to the point of stickers - racks of envelopes and magazines were sitting there and just waiting.