Finally finished the job at TransAmerica. It was somewhat interesting, but after a while doing nothing but make copies gets pretty dull. We ended up doing close to 100,000 copies total, in a little under 12 days. We finished around 1pm on tuesday and then had just a few loose ends to copy after that, and were out at about 2:45 or so. It was a nice enough place to work, but tiring to stand all day and make small motions. It took a fair amount of concentration too, to make sure that you got the originals and copies exactly the same, including staples, paperclips, folders, etc. I won’t really miss it, but it was nice to not have to be there until 9am too.

On the way out after we finished, we stopped in Kelly’s office to turn in our time sheets, and they asked if we could work at Moore again this weekend. I said I couldn’t today, but was free friday and saturday, but they said at first that they just wanted all 3 days. So Sabrina’s father did it today, and while he was there they said that if I wanted to work friday and saturday I could. I guess I will, although I was looking forward to having the weekend off. Not that I’m doing anything the rest of the week, but that’s not the point 🙂

Apparently Moore decided to try to keep temps going all the time, with two teams, the highly original A and B teams. Team A is working monday, tuesday, and wednesday, and Team B is working thursday, friday, and saturday, and both teams work 1 sunday/month. Kelly asked if we could both do team B for the rest of the month, so we will. The first week of October or so is the quarter end for Moore, and we’ll be there for another 2 week or whatever of non-stop work like we did at the end of last quarter. They send out the quarterly statements for several investment companies and have to have the extra help to get it all done on time, so they have over 100 temps come in just for those couple weeks to work, then send everyone back home. After that, in theory, we’ll go back to being the B Team and working 3 days/week.

It works out fairly well for me, since I’ll be starting the next quarter at Strayer on September 22nd. I’ll have 3 days of work, and 4 days to do my classes each week. Plus we’ll be done at Moore by 2 or so each day (except for the quarter end) and so I’ll have most of the days then too if I need them for something. The thing I’m vaguely worried about is that saying that I’ll do this on an on-going basis may mean they won’t give me other jobs that would pay better. Moore isn’t exactly known for being reliable, some weeks I may work 3 full days, and others it may be just 1 or 2 or none. I don’t like being tied to being essentially on-call 3 days/week and also prevented from taking better jobs. If they offered more money, that’d be different, but I’d rather take better paying jobs less frequently and do some different stuff, and hopefully stuff more interesting, than stuff envelopes for crap money with no commitment by them. I may talk to the people at Kelly and see what they have to say, I don’t know if I’ll be excluded from other job offers because of this or not, but would like to know before I do it too long. It’ll be good through the quarter end job, but after that I may not want to do it.

I got the last book for my classes this fall. It’s a book on C++ programming, and its used for 3 different classes, so at least I get my money’s worth. I’m looking forward to the class, I’ve wanted to do more C++ programming for a while, but haven’t had any reason to. The book is pretty much the standard book for a college programming class, and I’ve wanted it for a couple years now, so I’m glad I finally have it. It’ll be interesting to see how much the class I’m taking covers, if the book covers 3 courses. It is a big book, but not that big.

I started the 7 day job at TransAmerica yesterday. It’s copying giant files for an audit that they are doing, or something like that. The files are pretty big, and have a bunch of staples, and paperclips, and they are in other folders, or punched and inserted into folders with big metal fasteners. We have to make exact copies of the original, including how they are clipped etc, and put back the original exactly like it was. It’s a big pain to do, but it could be worse. After a year at Kinko’s it isn’t bad. The copiers they have are nice enough, so that helps. I can’t remember what model it is, but its something like the Ricoh Aficio 1055. I know it’s a Ricoh Aficio, but don’t remember the exact model. I’m not sure if we’ll finish the job in just 7 days, they are pretty big and it is slow going. There are only around 60 to do, but I’ve only done 5.5 or so I think., in 2 days. They said yesterday it might take a couple more days than they thought. I don’t think they expected the files to be quite as huge as they are. Some are much smaller than others, but they still take a long time. The people are all nice though, and they have free soda in the break room, so it’s a good enough job.

We went to Boston on sunday as planned. We went to a Thai restaraunt that was really good, and then to the Museum of Science. It was nice to see my sister and Gabe again, it’s been quite a while. We may go up in the next weekend or so depending on how plans work out because my father will be visiting for the holiday weekend. I don’t know if we’ll be able to go or not though. Sabrina and I made a stop at Trader Joe’s before we came home, and got a bunch of stuff. We got some atkin’s friendly cookies, and gummy bears, and bars. They had brands of bars that we hadn’t seen anywhere else, so we tried them out. They were ok, but not really great. We also got some Macadamia nuts, so I tried one of those today. I’ve never really liked nuts much, except peanuts, but we had gotten some mixed nuts from Wal-Mart and those have been fine, and included
macadamias. I don’t remember the last time I ate anything that tasted so nasty to me. I didn’t spit it out, but it was a close thing. At least I won’t waste calories eating them. 🙂

I didn’t mention it yesterday, but Kelly called (yes, again) and wanted us to work at Moore today and tomorrow. So we got up bright and early and worked from 6:30am to 2:30pm today, and we’re going to work 7-3pm or so tomorrow. It’s easy money, so we don’t mind, even if it does mean waking up rather early. I didn’t get much sleep last night since I had to get up at 5, and hadn’t been really expecting to so I had slept late yesterday, and didn’t feel tired ’till after midnight. I’m getting tired now, so I’ll have to go to bed fairly soon so I’m awake for work tomorrow.

I can’t go to bed at the moment because we’re trying out the bread machine. We got some atkins friendly bread machine mix and wanted to try it out. We got three kinds, wheat, white, and rye. We’re doing the wheat tonight. I’ve never used a bread machine before, so it’s fun to try. I’ve had bread from bread machines before, but I wasn’t the one making it. When I lived in Ohio Debby had one and it comitted suicide. It was running and the vibrations made it walk over to the edge of the counter and fall off. It made quite a mess so they had to get a new one.

Sunday we’re planning to go to Boston. I have no idea what we’ll do there, but hopefully we can find something to do, and somewhere to eat that is diet-friendly. We weren’t doing atkins at all while we were there, so we didn’t look for anywhere to eat that worked with it at the time. It’s hard to eat out at most restaurants when you can’t have carbs or sugar. We’ve managed here ok, but I don’t know what to do there. I’m sure we’ll find something.

So Kelly calls this morning, and surprise surprise, the job I’m doing isn’t starting thursday. Apparently the person bringing the stuff that we are supposed to be copying is flying in, and won’t be in until this weekend, so we are starting monday instead. It’s still supposed to be 7 days of work, and at least we’re still doing it at all, but it’s not exactly a surprise that things changed. They also said now that sneakers are ok, where they had said no sneakers the other day. That’s good for me though, I wasn’t really looking forward to wearing real shoes all day. And a polo shirt and khakis are fine, so that’s much better than a dress shirt. We’ll see what happens over the weekend now…

I got one of my books for my fall classes at Strayer today. I ordered two from Strayer’s online bookstore, and am getting the other one from Amazon. Amazon didn’t have the other 2 or I would’ve gotten all 3 from them. One of the two I got from the bookstore was backordered and shipped today (For my Networking class) and the one for my Business class came today. So one came today, one shipped today, and one was ordered today. Pretty weird coincidence. The business book seems to cover quite a bit of stuff. I haven’t read any of it yet, but I looked through the table of contents and flipped through a bit. It seems like it’ll be ok, but it’ll take some getting used to to be taking a class again. The database class I’m taking now doesn’t really count since it is stuff I already know for the most part, taking something new will be much harder.

We went to the new 99 Restaurant that opened in Avon today. We were pretty much the first people there, so that was sorta fun. I assume other people had been there throughout the day since they opened at 11:30am and we ate at 4:30, but we seemed to be the only ones there when we went in. It filled in some right after we got there, but at first it was just us. The food was as good as we were used to, and the service was good, so they were off to a good start. I’m pretty sure they’ll do well where they are, and we’ll certainly go back again.

Well, I went to Kelly to take my evaluation exams for MS Office applications today. They went pretty well, about what I expected. Actually, they were easier than I thought they would be. I think the scoring had 3 levels (that’s what I was told anyway), which go from basic, to proficient, to expert. I had been told that it was hard to get the expert rating because some of the stuff is either obscure, or had to be done the way they want, rather than the way people know how to do it.

For Office exams, they rate on office 97 and also Office 2000. I scored Proficient on both Powerpoint exams, and Expert for all the Excel and Word exams. I also took the Access exam, but that seemed to be scored differently, or I read what the person wrote down wrong. I got “ME” and have no idea what that means, but I only missed 1 question out of 25, so I assume it is some form of Expert. I also took 3 exams on data entry. The first was entering data that was incorrectly formatted, and making it correct in the entry, according to the specifications given. I got Expert on that too, as well as the regular data entry (alphanumeric). I only scored Proficient on the numeric (10-key) exam, but that’s pretty good considering I rarely have to do it.

In other Kelly news, almost as soon as I walked through the door coming home from taking my evaluations, a different Kelly office called and offered a very short term job for Moore Printing again. This one is just one friday/saturday, and the following 3 saturdays in september. So I’ll do that, it’s pretty much just stuffing envelopes. I sorta liked working at Moore when we did over the summer, its a very low stress job, and somewhat entertaining to do. Once that is over, it’ll be time for the quarterly big job for Moore, so I’ll probably be doing that too. Sabrina’s father will be doing all the Moore stuff too, so we can go together.

About half an hour after that job, they called again with a different job. This one is just 7 days (this thursday and friday, then the following monday-friday), at TransAmerica. It’s a pretty easy job too, just making copies of files all day. It’s alot of copying, but after working at Kinko’s for year, I’m pretty sure I can manage 🙂 There were 2 openings for that and I got first dibs on it, so that was nice.

After all that, I went for a bike ride, for the first time in almost 2 weeks. It was a really good ride, my highest average speed so far. I was surprised after not doing it for so long. It was a really nice day and I was glad I got to go again. When I got home, I found out that Kelly had called AGAIN, but this time for Sabrina’s father, offering him the second position at TransAmerica. They could’ve saved time and effort by just asking when they talked to me the first time 🙂 But that’s ok. So we’ll both be doing that one too. It’ll be slightly inconvenient for transportation, but not too bad. It just makes alot of people dropping eachother off and picking them up. It’s actually better for both of us to be doing it than just one of us, as far as rides go.

Well, I went to Kelly today to do paperwork for the job I thought I was going to be doing for them, and found out that I couldn’t do it. The company is located at the airport and security is really tight there. They are insisting that anyone that works for them has their own transportation because they can’t have people waiting around the building for rides. And since I have no car and would be getting a ride every day, that means I couldn’t do it. Oh well, something else will come up.

Monday I’m going to go back to Kelly and take some skill tests for Microsoft Office, and data entry, and stuff like that. Once that is on file I can be considered for more jobs, and better paying jobs, so that’ll be good. I’m pretty sure I can get at least mid-level competence on all the office applications, and possibly expert on a few of them. We’ll see how the exams go. I don’t know exactly what they cover or anything so it’s hard to say for sure. I’m taking my class in Access, and have gone through the whole text book, so I should do pretty well on that, and I’m pretty good with Word too. I’m not as good at advanced Excel or Powerpoint, but not bad either.