Being a picker at Amazon

I perhaps used a poor choice of wording in a post last week because a number of people wrote to inquire about how I am feeling since I had mostly been offline for a while. Given my past health issues, which I have written about on this site, the concern was understandable.

So, let me just say, I am feeling fine. No problems. In fact, I have lost a little weight, about five to seven pounds. And the reasons for the weight loss and for why I have been too busy to post on my blog are the same -- Amazon.

November was a busy writing month for me, though I wasn't able to post much on my blog. I finished THE TONTINE, my National Novel Writing Month novel, but had to juggle how and where I was writing because my laptop crashed at the end of October. As a result of the crash, I have only finished two freelance assignments since then.

So to make some extra money for Christmas, I took a job working in a warehouse for Amazon. (Actually, it's called a Fulfillment Center. Creative, huh?) It was a seasonal position and I thought it would also be part-time. It wasn't but more about that later.

Amazon has two facilities in central Indiana and I would imagine there are hundreds of millions of items in them -- for virtually anything you'd want to buy online. The logisitics of the place truly amazed me. I was quite impressed.

When you go to Amazon and buy that CD, DVD, video game, book, fuzzy Teddy bear or large, ugly, black, metal jewelry holder that looks like a music stand, it is in one of more than 10,000 (and perhaps a lot more) merchandise bins in the warehouse, and someone has to go to that bin to pick it up and start it on its individual journey to your door.

At Amazon, that someone is called a picker. And for several weeks, I was a picker.

Now that doesn't sound too bad and it isn't. You generally don't have to search. There is a scanner that tells you exactly where to go and when to go there. It also tells you when to put all your merchandise on a conveyor belt and send it on.

But like I said, there were no part-time positions, which I was hoping for. All jobs are for 40 hours a week (four, 10-hour days), except that this is their peak time of year. So there was an additional mandatory day of overtime. And, as they need, they add on one, one-and-a-half, or two hours to your daily shift.

So I worked 11 or 11.5 hours a day, five days a week, walking (conservatively) around 16-17 miles a night. I burned enough extra calories to loose weight. Plus I worked a nightshift, which started at 6:15 p.m. and ended at 6:15 a.m. And you had to work fast. The average hourly pick is more than 80 items an hour, which means you had to locate an item, on average, every 40 seconds or so. (There are pickers who average 125 picks per hour.)

I was so tired that the only things I could do were work and sleep. By the end of my shift, my feet and legs would be killing me. I could fall asleep at home in the middle of a conversation, which happened. I had hard time remembering which day of the week it was and didn't remember the date. I had little idea of what was happening in the outside world, except that it snowed sometimes overnight on the car. And it was cold. I wanted to quit at the end of my first week but didn't.

We were told they hire several thousand temporary workers at Christmas and retain only a couple hundred. They start laying them off as the work slowly dwindles. I got the call over the weekend, thank goodness. It was a tremendous relief!

So that's why I haven't been writing, or reading, for the last several weeks. But I am getting back into the swing.

I'm revamping my query letter for AN UNTIDY AFFAIR and will push forward with it in the coming year. And until I hear something on AFFAIR, I will be re-writing THE TONTINE, preparing to hit the streets with it by mid-year.

The writing life goes on. And so do I.

Thanks for reading.