Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
In the late summer of 2001, as I was finishing my last week of working for Katarina, I was asked if I was interested in working a bit in the checkouts. I remember being quite hesitant as to if I really wanted to work more right then, but somehow I still said yes. About two or three practises later I was making mistakes and frantically scanning the lists of PLU numbers for fruit and vegetables like I'd never done anything else in my life :-) ... With all the new things to learn and all the beginners' mistakes (there are many more than you might think!) to make it was pretty stressful for a while.
But things improved quite fast. Even though I for a long time only worked every other Saturday things stuck pretty fast. And I find myself enjoying checkout work more than online work in many ways. Especially the way you work for a set time instead of until it's done, that's a big thing to me. And of course the increased customer close contact, both good and bad :-) ...
Less nice points about checkouts are the amount of breaks and the repetitiveness. Two fifteen minute breaks on six hours of work doesn't sound like much, and it isn't either :-) ... I try to take my first break as late as possible, that does wonders to make the shift seem shorter. With longer shifts you suddenly get one break extended to half an hour, which is so long that you don't know what to do with all the time :-) ...
The repetitiveness isn't repetitive as in boring, but rather doing the same moves over and over and being in the same position for so long. If you sit down all the time your legs end up feeling all stiff and wobbly when you get up, and your neck usually protests a bit toward the end of the pass. The last two passes I've been standing up all the time, and so far it seems like a huge improvement all over. My legs and feet get tired of course, but that's just natural tiredness, not the stiffness of sitting down, and my neck isn't saying anything at all. Maybe it's just benefit of changing position and nothing long lasting, we'll see about that. I'm happy as long as it lasts anyway. Keeping away from the "on the plate all day" coffee seems to make working nicer too, the stomach is a lot more content without it :-) ...
I've only worked for about a year in the checkouts, but still there's been plenty of changes. Things have become more and more automatic, and, surprisingly, better and easier to handle at the same time. I don't remember completely what the system was like when I started, but it did feel a lot more low-tech and much more manual. Nowadays the checkout machines are Pentium IIs running Windows NT with nice shadowed alert windows and all :-) ... Nowadays you don't even have to leave the main terminal to log out, print the end-of-day slip or anything. New technology is nice.