Originally Posted by Ramona_W

I have now spent four days as one of those despised creatures known as the Walmart assembler. The hardest part is not spending hours trying to tweak parts that were poorly manufactured/damaged in transit although some people would probably say I devoted way too much time the other morning to making sure the front wheel of a cruiser didn't rub on the fender. (A colleague said "That's probably good enough. I mean, that's what Walmart stuff is: basically good enough." Yeah, but before I was an assembler, I was a mechanic and I don't want it to be "good enough"; I want it to be right.)

The hardest part is not deciphering the pictures and instructions clearly written in a language that isn't English then translated into English by someone who doesn't speak it very well. But I can tell already that a number of these items will be returned to the store because some parent has cracked the plastic windshield trying to put it in the frame or some kid has been injured falling on the small plastic bicycle attached to the Barbie bike that took two people and six hours of swearing to attach.

No, the hardest part is feeling I'm way behind and there's no way in hell I can catch up with all the team-building activities we have to participate in. Some of what's slowing me down is the tool kit they gave me to assemble bikes and ride-ons. It had no pliers. It had no screwdriver. It has wrenches of a sort but they are, in fact, cone wrenches and as such do not, of course, ratchet. I have all of these things in my personal tools but I am supposed to be requesting the necessary tools be designated for "store use" and it's like pulling teeth. ("But you already got a screwdriver. You need another one?" Yeah. I need a Philips and a flat-blade.") Then there are the team meetings and the store-wide meetings and the twenty minutes we spent walking as a team around the outside of the store to admire it and the twenty minutes I spent waiting for a "salaried member of management" to show up to clean up the blood after one of my co-workers sliced his finger open on a metal strap because he was using my cable cutters instead of "aviation snips".

There are 78 slots for bikes and 6 for ride-ons and they all need to be filled before we open in roughly three weeks. Someone should have been working on them since the 14th. I suppose it's silly to think of myself as being way behind when I only got the green light to start building/assembling on Tuesday. That is how I feel though. I'm delighted and excited to go to work every day because I'm getting paid to work with bikes and how cool is that? But I go home every day feeling I've only accomplished a fraction of what I needed/wanted to and that is much less cool.