Target in Summary

Way back in September I saw an ad for seasonal help at the Target Distribution Center located 4 miles away from Dad’s house. I had planned to be a driver helper at UPS again but the pay at the distribution center was almost $5.00 more an hour, with good reason.  Not that the driver helper job is easy.

I had already been turned down by Target in Hawaii. The small detail of being in town only five months doesn’t go over well with employers. The fact that I’ll work hard and show up is basically insignificant. I know two people who applied to the same store after me and worked there less than six weeks. The reason for quitting: too hard.

I was offered the packer job on the spot, conditional to the standard drug test. This one turned out to be my third of the year and still clean as a whistle. What a life I lead!

Initially, the job was to start Oct 8^th, but it was later pushed out to the 22^nd.  I counted the weekends I was scheduled. Three day work weeks, Saturday through Monday, 12 hours each day. A total of 27 days to Christmas. It didn’t seem too bad.  But when the short winter sun disappeared on a Friday afternoon and didn’t reappear until Tuesday morning that stretch became a mental change as well as a physical one. For me it was rough spending 12 hours in a confined work space in an unheated one million square foot warehouse rarely speaking to anyone and listening to conveyors run all day.  If there was no activity in any area of the warehouse the lights shut off and that gloom shadowed over the packer area isolating me deeper within my work space where I was surrounded by cardboard.

The packer job is simple. Hundreds of boxes of all shapes, sizes, and weights and containing various amounts of products (from beer making kits to vanilla extract) are delivered to the module where the packer works. The stuff comes from China, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and other countries where manufacturing is cheap and people want to kill us.  

 Behind the scenes someone in logistics has summarized the demands of the stores in the distribution center’s service area and someone else has slapped a label on the box with a bar code that tells the packer which store get what and how many. It's the packer’s job to scan that label, take the stuff out of the manufacture’s shipping container, then… shove it, place it, toss it, cram it, fold it but get it into another box that will go to the store along with hundreds of other boxes. Basically a packer is taking product out of one box and placing it in any combination of 36 to 42 other boxes.  This is done as quickly and as accurately as humanly possible. In some modules it can be done over 4000 times a day. I never dared figure out how that works out on a per minute rate.  Only once did I hit my daily target. Depressing. Add to that the responsibility to build and tape boxes, throw away shipper boxes and drag everything down the conveyors.  Sometimes it seems like I could not even take a drink of water or stop to use chap stick.  

Usually packers work in teams of two.  It is a logistic relationship.  When a product comes down the line it may not go to any stores on the other side of the conveyors.  If that is the case the packer places that product in the middle of the two conveyors for the other packer. Sometimes it adds up especially if the other packer is fast.  My competitive nature made it hard to let the other person get the best of me by stock piling material in the middle. Plus that just made the workspace seem more confined when that wall of cardboard went up between us. It should not have mattered because rarely did I have time to chat.

For my age I am in fairly good shape. But age makes joints stiff and painful. After grabbing, pulling, flipping, turning, tossing, etc… items of various weight and size all day long my fingers and wrist were killing me. There were times when I thought I would not even make it to the first break let alone the full day. The soreness disappeared when fatigue and repetitive drudgery turned to numbness.  I’d come home and soak my hands in cold water - an ice down like the major league pitchers do.  Expect the next day I had to pitch again.

The physical demand was bad enough but I managed to catch two colds, back to back. Not since Peace Corps has that happened. And I periodically delivered packages for UPS. The week before Christmas I worked Tuesday through Friday delivering packages for eight or more hours a day. Drained of energy I’d go to bed at 8pm to rise at 4:15am, hours well before the chickens were up. I had enough rest, but my fingers and wrists never stopped hurting. At Thanksgiving my sister told me I now have fat muscular fingers. Ah, the joy of that news!

There were days when I had to dig deep to stay on the job. I prayed to God for His strength. The events of life passed. In October there was Hurricane Sandy. I told God I had no complaints.  I was thankful for the roof over my head.  In November for some stupid reason the country re-elected Obama.  Again, I told God I had nothing to complain about. I wasn’t making $400,000 so what did I care even if my country was falling apart? In December came the tragedy of New Town. I thanked God I knew no sudden heart wrenching loss. But when what I thought would be my last day (and I had mentally checked out on December 31) turned out not to be, I almost told God I had a complaint.  I asked for the strength to go back one more weekend.  Then I went down to Wal-Mart and bought another nine slices of roast beef for my lunch sandwiches.

At first break on Saturday I asked my group leader when the last day would be she said, “Soon. Really, really soon.” That afternoon she made the rounds and told the seasonal workers the season was done.

Thank God, I made it.