Well, after a whole week and a half of being unemployed, I start work again tomorrow! I’ll be working at the Xerox printshop on the Microsoft campus, the same place that I worked two days at last Friday and Saturday. I guess they liked me!
As I mentioned a few days ago, Today’s was able to put me in a short 2 day post. The printshop is on the Microsoft campus out in Redmond, so it’s a bit of a commute, but a little research with the Seattle Metro Trip Planner and I had my bus schedule down pat. I left my apartment at about 12:30, walked up a few blocks, and caught a bus out to the bus depot in Redmond.
At that point, things got a little dicey. One of the downsides to the trip planner is that when you need to walk somewhere to your next stop, it gives you the directions ‘WALK 0.2 MILES NORTH’ or some such. Thing is, silly me, I’d forgotten my compass (of course, I don’t actually have a compass, but hey…), and in my attempt to find my next bus stop, I walked the wrong way. I didn’t know this, however, until I got on the bus and started watching the street signs — and realized that the numbers were counting the wrong direction!
Oops.
The driver let me hop off, I walked back to the bus depot, and started walking the correct direction…and suddenly realized that I could see one of the buildings I’d been told to look for! Apparently all that second bus would have done was take me across the bridge over the highway, which I was in the midst of doing already. Well, cool enough — from there on, it was a fairly short walk to the building I was looking for, and I made it on time.
As soon as I walked in, I was pretty sure that this would be a print shop that would be fun to work in. The room is huge, and it’s got tons of cool toys to play with! One side of the room is the bindery area (cutting, binding, packing, etc.). The other side of the room had me practically drooling…(and yes, the following will mean very little to anyone who hasn’t worked in printshops before)…one DocuTech 135, five Docutech 6180‘s (all with BookletMaker extentions), one DigiPath workstation, one DocuColor 2060, plus four smaller color machines that I didn’t catch the model numbers for, and an oversize color printer. Yikes! Very cool. :D
I didn’t get to play with any of the big toys while I was there, though — I’d been called in to help out in the bindery area with a couple big jobs that they had in. Apparently I was a hit, though — when I first told Karen, the evening shift supervisor, that I had quite a few years of prior printshop experience, she was thrilled to get someone that she wouldn’t have to train. Then, throughout the night, I kept surprising her when I was done with something and looking for more to do. Saturday there was a different shift supervisor coming off the afternoon shift, but two hours after I’d gotten there, she’d declared that they were keeping me, and by the end of the night, Karen was slipping a note under the boss’s (boss’?) door to see what they could do to hire me on, as they’ve got one person leaving at the end of this week.
Yesterday I passed this all on to Terri and Sally at Today’s, and they said they’d be sure to get ahold of the powers that be at Xerox and see what they had to say about the weekend. This morning, then, I get a call from Terri, who tells me that I should show up at the printshop tomorrow at 2pm, ready to go! I guess I made the right impressions with the right people, as I’m now confirmed for a long-term posting (so now, rather than working for Today’s for Xerox for Andersen, I’ll be working for Today’s for Xerox for Microsoft…funny how this all works).
There are a couple caveats to the situation, of course.
It looks like I’ll be working Monday to Friday, 2pm-10:30pm. On the one hand, this is great, as I tend to enjoy evening schedules, and I’ll still have my weekends free — however, the bus jaunt is only really simple on the way out, by the time I’m coming back into town I’m well past peak bus time, and will be getting back home at around 1am each day. Candice has said that she’ll be able to give me rides some of the time, though, which should help out.
The biggest downside is that the starting pay rate is a whole whopping $9.74/hr. However, this also goes to show some of why I really like going through Today’s — as they were setting this all up, they did mention to Xerox that with the experience I have, I should be worth more than that, and managed to confirm a performance review after 30 days to see about getting the pay scale bumped up closer to what I’d like to be getting! I’ve gotta say, I’m am nothing but thrilled with the service I’ve gotten going through Today’s.
So that’s the big news. Pretty cool, I’d say. The next month might be a bit tight on funds, since my pay rate just dropped by $2/hr, and because of that I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to make the trip up this summer to see James and Stacy get married, but at least I have income again, and it’s not completely out of the question. Just gotta cross my fingers and see what happens!