Completed Day 2 of Work

I was way too tired yesterday when I got home to write anything so I will discuss both days now -- they were essentially the same anyway.

We had our initial orientation in the break room and at about 0900 the daily store meeting happened around us. I had heard that all Walmart employees do a special cheer as part of their team building but I didn't expect to be a part of it. I don't know about other stores but our store does the cheer. Every morning.

The history of this store is short which is a positive, really. It will have been open 2 years in July. The manager has been with the company for 13 years -- since he was in high school -- and has worked his way up to having his own store. He is young, enthusiastic, respectful to his employees, and follows the rules, as far as I can tell. Morale seems to be good though there is the standard whining and a little bit of negativity. There are only 78 people employed at the store so everyone knows each other (or will once we last 3 have met everyone).

Walmart has training down to such a science; it warms my efficient heart. They use a Computer Based Learning (CBL) system and you are assigned modules based on your job definition. That means that I had training in produce processing, etc. while my co-newbies Reggie and Stacey had training in cashiering and Over the Counter Drug stocking, respectively. Of course, we also had common modules such as Sexual Harassment, FMLA, etc. etc. As new processes come out new modules are written and assigned to each employee and we are responsible for logging into the system and checking for pending CBLs.

The first 3 days are set aside to complete the CBLs (approximately 25 of them) but it is encouraged that you complete them sooner than that. I started them after lunch yesterday and finished them today at about 1:15. It gave me brain-drain but it also meant that I got off work early today because my trainer didn't work today and there was nothing else for me to do.

So tomorrow I will be in produce learning my job. Joe is my trainer and he seems both nice and competent -- anyone who knows me knows that the competence matters more to me than the nice.

Oh, and time clocks have changed considerably since my last exposure to them (in 1980). I love technology.