Hello Long Service Leave!

Ten years ago I walked into Woolworths Chermside West to start my first shift in the online department which had only been operating for a couple of months, little did I know that a decade later I would still be there!

In the early days we only picked orders at night, so I would start at 8pm and often work till the wee hours of the morning. We used flat top trolleys with crates that the fruit and veggies used to be delivered to the stores in. Each order had to be picked separately using a clipboard and pen to tick off items as we packed them.

As the service grew in popularity we saw the introduction of day shift starting early in the morning, yeah my alarm goes off at 3am most mornings, the arrival of custom designed trolleys and totes and an automated picking system that allows you to pick multiple orders at one time, and whilst it is far from perfect it is way more efficient.

There have been plenty of tears, lots of laughter, more bruises than I can count, a crushed meniscus, and many bouts of sheer exhaustion but I am still there and now me leave account is nice and full and I could take more than three months off fully paid if I wanted to…..but we can’t really go anywhere right now!

I have had many days where I have been so tempted to walk out the door and not go back after working so hard to get the orders completed with not enough staff that I ache, but low and behold the last few months I have definitely not been one of the many unlucky people who have lost their job due to Covid-19 but probably have had one of the most secure jobs in the country. I will be honest though and seeing all the people doing the right thing and staying home, working from home and not having to get up at ungodly o’clock to work 5 days a week has made me a little jealous. Spending days crafting away in my studio would be rather blissful.

So for now I will keep going to work and building up my leave account even more, and keeping dreaming about holidays like the one I was meant to go to in April to Phuket and hopefully one day our borders will open again and we can grab our passports and head to the airport.

What have you had to cancel thanks to Covid-19?