New guy started yesterday. He did mailing lists for a year at another company. He said they pretty much stuck him in a cubicle with a computer and that was it. We really needed someone to help with the mailing lists. So he's supposedly half mailing, half bindery. The last two days he's been following me around learning bindery stuff. He's got a great attitude and wants to learn how it all works. He's got quite a ways to go; I had to teach him how to tape up a box. But I think he'll do well once he gets the hang of things. This afternoon he asked me about how the whole process of printing works. So I took him through typesetting and the plates and the presses and all of it. He didn't know how any of it happened. It makes me sad that some printing companies don't care if their employees know what they're doing or why they're doing it that way. When I train people I try to give them examples of why I do things the way I do. If they want to go about it differently and still achieve a quality result that's great. Maybe I can learn from them. And when I teach about ways to prevent mistakes I look for jobs in the shop to illustrate my point. Yesterday I was able to use a job we had in bindery to show him why it's so important to look all the way through the work order and not stop at the first page. If I stopped reading the work order at the first page I'd have missed half the stuff we were supposed to do to it.

He's funny; it was about 3:30 or so and he had already had a sugar crash from not being used to the work. I don't think he'd ever crashed like that but he started feeling weird and dizzy so I gave him some cashews and had him sit down for a few minutes. Anyway, one of the pressmen comes up and asks for a favor: 10,000 sheets of paper for a job he has to run that just came out. No biggie for me but for the new guy it's like, 'whaaaaa?'. So I go and get the lift and get the skid of paper and it's almost a full skid still so it weighs probably... oh, 3000 pounds or so. I pull it out and start pushing it over to the cutter and he stops and goes, "You're a beast!!!" I had to stop and laugh because I feel so weak being around all the guys all the time. Sometimes my body weight just isn't enough to do my job efficiently.

I am still feeling a ton better. I've been working a lot- like gogogogogo hard work but I still feel good when I get home. I've baked for two nights in a row. I'm not going to bake tonight. I feel good enough to but I don't want to get all the boys spoiled. ;-) I think instead I might try to figure out Christmas gifts for my Dad's side. I'm thinking mason jars with my personal cornbread mix in them and maybe jars with mixed beans so they can make beans and cornbread for New Years or something like that. I could make cute tags with instructions. And that wouldn't take up too much time or money. Yup. That's what I'm going to do.

See ya later!