Well, I’ve completed three days on the job, so I thought I would share a little bit about how my new position is working out. I’m a Quality Control Technician working at a company called Sharp, which serves to package numerous commonly encountered drugs, both prescription and over the counter. Currently, I’m still in training, working on a packing line that fills pouches with a soluble allergy medication.
The work is pretty straight forward; I pull several samples off the line twice an hour, weighing each pouch and making sure the machine is filling the pouches to the proper level. Once an hour, I also make sure that all the information is correctly being printed on the pouches, the boxes into which they are packaged, and the shipper containers we use for the boxes. I also verify that the pouches are waterproof, subjecting them to vacuum conditions underwater.
It’s surprisingly time consuming; the weighing takes about fiften to twenty minutes (although I’m slowly getting faster) and checking the printing and waterproofness takes about ten minutes, meaning I have fairly little time each hour to get from one part of the lab to the other. To say nothing of having more work to learn that will take even more time.
The busy schedule does mean that the night moves pretty quickly. It’s not the most mentally challenging work by any stretch, but given the current economy and the trouble I’ve had jobs in the recent past, and I’m happy to have work, at least temporarily. So far, things have been rather uneventful; do some work, learn a bit more, repeat.
However, last night was an exception: one of the girls working on the production line ended up fainting. I don’t think it was anything to do with the lab itself; although it is a bit on the warm side, it was far from hot. There is powder that we use to fill the pouches that was in the air, so it’s possible she had a bad reaction to that (although, we’ve been packaging the same compound the whole time I’ve been working, so she probably would have had a reaction earlier). It was startling, but the paramedics were called in, and hopefully, she will be healthy and happy by tonight.
Some excitement, then, of the less than good variety. But, so far it’s been a pretty good week, and I do like this position. We will have to see where things go from here.
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