Record-Breaking Team!

Hey, here's a better urinal test than the one I gave yesterday: http://drinknation.com/fun/urinaltest It gives a final interpretation of your score, and it was the one I was trying to find yesterday. If you must know, the first time I took it several years ago, I got 40/60. Coming back, I got 50/60. I guess I've gotten better at peeing.

Hey, just so you guys know, if I'm doing Karate, I won't be able to update this blog, probably. I think Ive said this, but Karate takes five hours out of my schedule. So how it works is, I get home, sleep for eight hours, have three hours to my myself, travel and do Karate for five hours, get home, go to work almost immediately. So all I have is that three hour window, and it just so happens to usually be a bad time for my chances of getting on the computer. Karate is open six days a week, but classes are only convenient to my schedule four days a week. I try to make all four, but I usually only make two or three. Two is the expectation, so I'm in the good right there.

I found out what the big parts that we do are. They're axles. We make clutches and axles. I need to find out what I'm inspecting at pack-out.

Today we lost another member of our group. He got fired. He was a good worker, but he missed at least a day a week. Another member of our group called in sick... It's his first time doing that, so he's in the good, but that meant that today, there was only three of us. Half our usual team.

Now, it's expected that 3000 parts are made in a day. That's 1000 per shift. 500 per team. My original group had the company record of 1200 in a shift. 200 more than average. We usually break 1000, but don't meet 1200. Today we were expected to make 1000 parts, with only one group. That's hard, because even with our record-breaking score, it was 600 parts per team. Now, we worked really hard. Really, really hard. Last hour, we wanted to know how much we'd made 800 parts on the dot. My team was all depressed about not being able to do the standard 1000! I told them that this was a day to be proud of, not ashamed. If there had been two teams with workers of our quality, we would've made 1600 parts, that would have broken our previous record by 400, and we'd still have an hour left in the day! Even if, officially, we're counted by shift, as a team, we must have broken another record.

But they were still kind of sullen, with comments like "Yeah, for three people, we didn't do bad", and, "We did our best, and that's all that can be asked of us."

By the end of the shift, we had built 936 parts.

That's GOOD! The company will have their standard 3000 by the end of the day! And it couldn't have been done without our effort! Our team exceeded expectation by 436 parts, and if each team after us can exceed expectation by 16, the company has their 3000!

I'm applying for a few jobs... Support Worker positions for people with developmental disabilities. Jobs like I did back at Community Connections in Katimavik, my favourite work placement. Turns out, my old employment counselor from Ways2Work, after moving to Canada and working factories for a few years, went straight into that, and has given me the contact info. I wouldn't have even tried applying for something suited to my interests or even credentials pre-Katimavik, but I had enough success on my initial applications that I'm actually thinking it might be worth a shot.

They want a cover letter. I wrote one out and it felt like it fit the requisites of what a cover letter should be perfectly. But I only looked up online guides. I should get my employment counselor friend to look at it. I'm a little suspicious because I didn't really have to edit it, and I usually edit a lot. I guess I worked hard enough at it... I thought about it lot and wrote it over the course of three days, but still...