OurTurn: We are OUTTA here!!

We finished up our "tour of duty" so to speak, at Amazon. It was a long 7 weeks. We are headed to Arizona and then onto San Diego to be with our kids and grandkids for a few weeks.

We continued in the inbound area stowing and Sean waterspidering until the last week. We were then moved to outbound gift wrapping. I am a terrible wrapper and literally paid my daughter, Meghan, to gift wrap for me from about the age of seven. I even had her wrap her own Christmas gifts after I put them into plain boxes and taped them shut. So when I saw the work list and my name under gift wrapping, I panicked! I went to the supervisor and said if you think I am lousy at stowing, wait until you see my gift wrapping! I even explained how I had paid my daughter for years to do it for me. In typical Amazon style, they didn't really care but they did think it was funny. Ha ha. Fortunately, a coworker took me under her wing and said she would wrap and I could put the ribbon on and the gift tag. Sean was still stowing at this point but he found it VERY humorous that I was gift wrapping...until they sent him the next night. After one night of ribbons and tags I felt like I could handle the actual wrapping. And, like most things, after you do it 5000 times you get pretty good at it. Meghan would be proud! I actually ended up really liking gift wrapping for two reasons. One, they had music! You don't realize how wonderful having music is when you do repetitive boring things for 10 hours. When your stowing the only sound you hear is the whirring of the conveyor belts moving customers purchases from the shelves to shipping. And two, it was very well lit. The rest of the warehouse is on the darker side and my old eyes didn't appreciate the dimness. The bad thing about gift wrapping is that you stand in one place for 10 hours at tables that are too short for me and incredibly too short for Sean. Standing is very hard on our backs. Both of us have bad backs though we can walk all day, we cannot stand for long without feeling great pain. But for Sean it went from uncomfortable to painful. I told the supervisor he was a great waterspider but his exceptional reputation hadn't reached shipping yet. At this point Sean did have one of the taller tables but it was only minimally helpful. Half way through his first shift they asked us to move further up the line to some empty stations. Sean just looked at her and said "absolutely not". He explained that this table was a little taller and he couldn't move to a shorter table. She then said how about if you waterspidered? He happily accepted! Within a few hours his prowess as a waterspider was made apparent and he happily remained in that position for most of the rest of the week. At the end of his first shift waterspidering in gift wrap, an older lady said, "look at that water monkey boy go! He never stops moving and keeps up on everything"! The next night when he was assigned to waterspider, a group of older ladies cheered! Goodness, the guy is hard enough to live with anyway and now I have old women cheering for him! I will never hear the end of this!! My claim to fame is by the last night I wrapped approximately 125 gifts in my 10 hour shift. I understand there is a utube where a real full time Amazon guy wraps a gift in 17 seconds....obviously I have a long way to go.

We had the rig mostly ready to go and so we came home, slept a few hours and hit the road. We spent the night for the very first time in a Wal Mart in Elk City, Oklahoma. For you non Rv folk, Wal Mart happily allows overnighting in their parking lots as long as there is room. We have hesitated to try it out but many people do it and we only wanted to sleep and move on, which we did. We were asleep by 9:00 p.m. and woke up at 7:00 a.m. the next morning. We are now happily day people again!

Our stint at Amazon was many things..... Painful, mind numbingly boring, cold, wet and very busy. It was also briefly interesting, monetarily positive and we met some great people! Will we do it again... Maybe if they have some openings in warmer climates. Rv rigs, no matter how expensive, are not meant to be in pro longed freezing temps. It isn't good for them and it is hard on their owners! Personally, I would rather be financially able to just go and do whatever we want whenever we want but that is not possible financially for us until we win the lottery. And, we really get to know people when we have these types of jobs. You get to know them and hear their stories. We have made some great friends that we will hopefully meet up with again as we all head on down the highway!

Watching the Broncos at the local dive bar, the Zone