At work

I finally started my temporary, part-time job on Friday and it was quite an experience after being out of the paid workforce for so many years.I I’ll be working three six-hour shifts a week for the next six to eight week, going from 12-6pm.

The first day started well enough, although I couldn’t work out where to buy the parking permit I needed and ended up in the visitor hourly parking. Apparently it was quite amazing I found the building as most of the other staff had trouble working out where it was. This group was located in one of the main buildings last year but has been relegated to a small trailer sort of building due to the amount of noise from the machines being used.

The job mostly consists of checking booklets to make sure details are correct and that students haven’t marked in inappropriate areas on any pages. Then the spines of the booklets are cut off and the pages are scanned into the computer system. These three tasks appear to be what I will be doing for the next several weeks. I spent three of my four starting hours doing the cutting using some fancy machine. It works fairly well but there’s a lot of fixing up the stacks of booklets and then simultaneously pushing buttons to do the cut. Even after the first hour my thumbs were getting sore. The last hour I was able to move into another room and do the starting work on another batch of booklets. By this time, there were only two of us there as almost everyone had started early in the morning and departed not long after I arrived. This might have been an advantage because it was quite warm on Friday and the trailer was rather warm despite the ceiling fans. I hope there is an air conditioning system when it really gets warm next month.

Anyway, I was able to stop at one of my favorite grocery stores after I left and find all sorts of delights. This made the half hour drive home a bit more bearable. My next work day is Tuesday and I plan to wear more comfortable clothes in case I end up standing for long periods again.