So I figured I'd do a blog post about my actual life. I'm pretty sure I can post this and not break any company confidentiality stuff because all pictures are from google searches. 

Maybe some of you have had similar experiences, and I'd love to connect (commiserate. jk)

For the past 13 months, I've been a warehouse grunt at a local Amazon warehouse. Yes, they do call them 'fulfillment centers', and we are 'Amazon Associates', not 'laborers'. Anytime I bring this up - that I work at Amazon, I get a lot of questions, like "I hear it's terrible! How can anyone like it there!", or sometimes, "Oh! I saw a news/youtube video! are you a picker?" But a common denominator is that people always want to know more about it. 

As a disclaimer: I'm not recommending you go out and sign up to work at your local Amazon Fulfillment Center, I'm not trying to recruit or promote them. I've personally had a good experience there, and people are always curious what I do. Since shopping season is coming up, and I have a feeling many more people will be ordering online this year, I figured it would be cool to have a little bit of 'behind the scenes'. 

Positives - I know this isn't representative of all fulfillment centers. In fact, I'm assuming it's not. I've heard from multiple people at my warehouse who have tried out the other warehouses in the area (Amazon and otherwise), that my building is one of the best in the area. Not entirely sure what they mean by that, but I do honestly like it there. Definitely not a career, but still. 

1. Diversity - Grew up in a homogenous area, which is fine, but it's nice to work at a place that's majority minority. Contrast to my graduating high school class of 250, where I was one of five of my racial minority student. Just from people I've talked to at work, we have representation from Nepal, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Morocco, India, Pakistan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Kenya, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, and probably a lot more I don't know about. 
2. People - The other side of the 'people-at-work' coin is the people who have never left the state their entire life. But, contrary to what I expected at a warehouse, people are really nice and willing to help you out. Like, 98% of them, at least. And the bad apples, it's a big enough warehouse that you don't really have to deal with them much. 
3. Active - I get to be on my feet all day, which took about 2 weeks to physically adjust to, but I sleep really well at night. 
4. 3 day weekend - Yes, we work four 10-hour days a week, normally. Three day weekends are great. But yes, during peak season - that is, holiday season, it's normal to work six 10-hour days and basically only sleep on your day off. 
5. Stable job in a pandemic - I thought I'd only be working there for a gap year to save up for grad school, but, surprise! pandemic. I almost took a cushy secretary job, and then applied to a few TESOL positions in schools when I moved back home to start working/saving up, but I wanted something that would let me walk out easily (without feeling bad). Honestly, the wages there, and the overtime they offer, I make more than I would at a 'cushy' job. And especially with all the layoffs during the early pandemic, I definitely would have been cut from a school, and possibly an office. But with the hazard pay and extra time offered during lockdown (extra time was offered because the company offered unlimited unpaid time off to quarantine and stay safe - some people wanted it to be paid time off. You get paid quarantine time with proof of a positive test, or proof a family member has tested positive. Also, free COVID testing at work, and they're super stringent with masks and distancing and sanitizing.) 
6. Fun stuff - The company does things like catering lunches during peak season and prime week, raffles, dress up (in ways that don't violate safety codes) for halloween or as superheroes etc (no capes!). I won a camping set last year, and $200 bonus just last week, actually. 

Negatives - Forewarning, I do that thing where if I overthink a negative too long, it becomes a positive, or at the very least, a learning experience. 

1. People - The aforementioned 'bad apples' - they definitely threw me for a loop my first months there. Lots more cussing than I was used to, but not less than I expected. Lots of honking when driving powered industrial trucks (PITs, from here on out, and more on those later), lots of complaining and malicious gossip. But again, easy enough to avoid. People also sometimes think they're above rules and safety measures (granted, there are a TON, esp. with COVID. yes, we're aware Amazon takes drastic measures to avoid any type of lawsuit even though it could easily handle them), and while it would take a lot for me to narc on someone, it's kind of stressful to witness. 
2. Apathy - Sometimes driving the aisles of product feels like I'm literally running the rat race to feed rampant consumerism. I try not to let it get to me. Working for a huge company bothered me a bit, but I try not to overthink it and camp in a moralistic spot on the issue. It pays bills and one person deciding they doesn't like monopolies (I prefer Catan XD) won't stop them from making billions. 
3. Physically demanding - Some days are worse than others, it depends on my job that day. I developed mild tendonitis in my writing hand/arm from the controls on one of the PITs, so that's not fun. It's getting better, but my arm falls asleep doing totally normal things, like reading or typing, which is annoying. 

Yeah, I want to get out and go to grad school (I'm supposed to be in Vancouver! I'd MUCH rather be there, pursuing my dream, than moving boxes all day), but it's not a bad place to be stuck while I wait. I did try to take online classes in the summer for school. Absolutely hated it. The way I put it to people at work who asked how it went - "Yeah, I was alone in my parent's basement, sitting and staring at a screen, losing money, when I could have been on my feet, with people, at work making money." Also, I'm self conscious how much I've mentioned money in this post. But tuition doesn't pay itself. 

My Job

I mentioned this before, but we normally work four 10-hour days. I work from Wednesday to Saturday, starting at 7:30 AM until 6:00 PM. We have two half-hour breaks - an unpaid break at 11, and a paid break at 2:30. Usually your job changes slightly between periods (like, I'd be picking in the morning, then after first break, be on the ship dock, for example. More on that below). The break room has multiple fridges, microwaves, and what looks like the grab-n-go section at a gas station for people who want to buy their lunch on site. There are lots of TVs, and enough space to sit alone, which I like. As for the actual job: 

The warehouse I work at has 4 departments. 

1. Inbound - responsible for bringing product in (receiving), palletizing or organizing it in order to shelve it (stowing). Their peak season is October-November, basically leading up to holidays. 
2. Outbound - responsible for shipping out orders. Pickers go out and get the items in the shelves, packers ... pack? I don't know how to put it more succinctly. Ship dock makes sure the items get into the right trailers to be sent off. Peak season is Thanksgiving-Christmas, basically. 
3. ICQA - quality control, goes around counting items in specific shelf locations (called bins, which can be whole pallets of items, a jumble of smaller items in a drawer or box/space on a shelf, or sometimes pallets in rows on an open floor, it depends on the warehouse). because sometimes there's a discrepancy between how many items a picker picks verses what a stower stows, and it messes up the numbers in the computer, which is bad. 
4. TV-grading - I think my building is the only one in the area with this department. They're also called vendor returns, but most people return TVs, apparently. Their peak season is after Christmas when customer expectations were disappointed, and after the Super Bowl. 

I've been trained in three of the jobs mentioned above. Stowing, picking, and ship dock. Now, I don't stow very often, I'm primarily an outbound worker. My first job was picking, my favorite job is ship dock. 

Picking
Depending on the warehouse, picking is either mechanical, or done on foot. My warehouse, it's all done with machine. The main type of machine used to pick is (surprise!) called an order picker, and it looks like this.

You can kind of see the controls (circle is steering, acceleration is hidden behind the guard rail, but it's above that orange bar). They can elevate up to 40(ish) feet, and have a maximum speed of 5mph, and are battery powered. There are a TON of rules, like no driving when elevated, don't elevate within a certain distance of another picker or person, don't drive straight at a person, honk at every intersection, and so on. 

So pickers drive around the shelves with carts (both pictured below) that they fill up with orders that are filtered through the algorithms, and show up on each picker's scanner gun (also pictured). 

Shelving units, pretty standard. 

Carts that go on the back of the order pickers (also used by other machines, but we're only concerned really with the OP (order picker) here). The open side goes toward the OP machine, you can see the rectangular metal slots below the bed of the cart - that's where the machine's forks go. So, I technically drive a fork lift! There's a locking mechanism to keep the cart attched to the machine at all times. 

These are the scanner guns that almost everyone uses, and they're basically little computers. You scan in your ID badge and you have certain process paths assigned, from what I understand. A basic process path would be something like picking orders that are in aisles 105-125. 

So the picker fills up the cart and then drops it off at the packing lines. I haven't learned packing, and really don't have a desire to. They're called pack cells for a reason. Cells. 

Ship Dock
I love working here! One, there's no rate, two, you're walking around instead of standing on your little picker machine alone all day, and you can talk with people! (I'm an extrovert, "extrovert with introverted hobbies like reading and being alone', is what I say.) On the ship dock, we have about 20-some of the 18wheeler trailers, and we sort the boxes coming down the conveyor/chutes into the right trailers. 

Here are pictures (again, from google) of similar conveyor setups. The packers push the boxes onto the automated belts, which then make their way to the shipping dock.

This is one of the favorite jobs on the ship dock - it's called diverting. You're up on a catwalk with boxes being conveyed (is that the right verb?) past you. You're standing in front of 2-3 chutes that lead down straight into trailers. You have to look at the shipping labels as they go by you, and push the right boxes down the right slides. It's like a video game but in real life. Also, in diverting, you have to keep an eye on the conveyor line and when stuff gets stuck, unjam the line, which is always stressful. 

Here's a diagram of what a conveyor going into a truck looks like.

Loading trucks is probably the most physically demanding, especially when the boxes are coming down the chute faster than you can stack them safely, and sometimes you get boxes bigger than you, or carpets twice your height. But that's what friends are for. 

Here's an example of a nicely stacked truck. 

The boxes that don't go straight to trailers get palletized or sorted into carts, and shipped off in other trucks. I'm not sure entirely how that all works, what gets sent where, why, etc, but I think it would be cool to learn someday. I'm not good at building pallets, you have to have this certain spatial awareness and sense of how to balance things so it doesn't fall. I'm learning, but I'm always a bottleneck on the pallet building team, unfortunately. Here are examples of built and wrapped pallets. 

 





So, that's the long and short of my job. I hope it was informative, and I'm totally open to questions - I'll answer what I can!