A day in the life of – Shannon Beer

This blog is part of a series of personal accounts of working at Essential Recruitment.

Shannon is a 21 year old Recruitment Consultant from our Ripley office. Since joining us in 2015,  she has had amazing success in her work, but has also earned the reputation of Class Clown…

Today we take a look at an abnormal day for Shannon and the challenges she faced whilst covering a shift with one of her clients!

Understaffed on Tuesday morning, Shannon got up around 4:45am. She’s not the nicest at that time in the morning so she decided she was going to snooze from 4:30am.
Just to make sure she wasn’t the only one who could hear the alarm, she also woke up her partner and made him go outside (in her pink dressing gown) to move his van because he was blocking her in! If Shannon is up, everyone’s up.

Shannon got in her car, put all the windows down to get some air and attempted to wake up. She began her journey to Denby, passing by her Dad’s house just to make sure her Step Mum had gone to work so she wouldn’t have any unfilled shifts! She’d left, clearly an early riser unlike Shannon!

Shannon finally arrived at SC Johnson. As she got out of the car, a Temp approached her. It was only 5:50am and he asked what she was doing here so early, she told him it was too early to chat and they’d talk later, but that she was there to work on the line and train some newbies.

Off she trotted into the changing room where she popped on her boiler suit (AKA telly tubby suit!) and popped on all of her GMP Workwear and off she went into the factory.

Having completed the training on site for the 2 new starters, this is where Shannon would normally make her way back to the office. However today she was in fact going to work for 4 hours to plug a gap! She spoke to the supervisor and checked which line she’d would be working on, LINE E. She had a laugh and joke with the line runner and told him to be nice because it’s extra, extra early!

The shift began simply, packing boxes, except the machine kept breaking down and there were many spillages – something was destined to break because she was working!  The line runner asked her (very, very nicely ) if she wouldn’t mind if he bypassed the capper and she manual cap all the little bottles! Shannon, being the softie she is, was very obliging and agreed to this.

Off she went screwing lids whilst another temp packed and stacked the boxes – absolute teamwork! She even broke out in a sweat, so no need for the Gym!

Another temp who was working on another line kept shouting ‘not long till your break now’ – mad factory banter…  Shannon had now been awake 4.5 hours with no food, a dangerous combination to say the least – she was starting to waste away!

Twenty to nine came and it was time for a 20 minute break – She sat in the canteen eating her sausage cob and a full sugar Lucozade (which another worker bought her!) chatting away to all the workers.

9am came and back to work it was!

By 10am, it was the end of  Shannon’s shift as she had  to leave to run an induction.

Shannon called through to reception and heard that her new worker had arrived in a flap! She dropped what she was doing,, fetched him from reception and got him ready.

She went through two presentations before leaving her new worker to watch the manual handling video (that she must of watched as part of the induction 10,000,000 times)  and went BACK INTO THE FACTORY to  help out a little more! She needed to work that sausage cob off!

Having completed the new worker’s training, she headed back into the canteen to say goodbye to him and the rest of the team.

Just as she was about to leave (by now 12pm) she bumped into more temps in the canteen. One was the same guy from this morning asking if she’d woken up yet, another asked if she was working full time and the permanent members of staff were joking around, asking if she wanted to fill out a timesheet – she’s onsite that much!

Shannon finally left for the office at around 12:30pm and set back to her normal office work, (nice and cosy as another Temp pointed out to her!)

Having arrived back, she sang her colleague, Paula a few songs (Shannon wouldn’t want her to go a day without hearing her amazing voice, she’ll be on X Factor 2019 – watch out! )Well watch out for someone in a yellow coat making a fool of themselves!)

She debated for an hour over what to eat for Lunch. She was craving Chicken Super Noodles, but had to settle for a Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle  – minus all the sweetcorn that she had to pick out piece by piece…

3pm arrived and off she went home – in her famous yellow coat – she called into her Dad’s and tried to nap on the sofa till her sister arrived and they had their monthly row ( same time every month they have the same row, if that’s even possible?)

She finally set off home where she thought she’d be extra organised and put tonight’s Tea into the slow cooker. She got the slow cooker out and heard the loudest smash in the world, the lid had smashed into the worlds tiniest pieces alllllll over the floor! So, like any standard girlfriend she left it for her partner to clean up and left to go and purchase another slow cooker! In the car she blamed it on lack of sleep, and top top things off, when she arrived home with the new slow cooker she put it on the side, right on top of some eggs… as you can probably imagine the eggs where now smashed, fab.

8pm came around and off she went to bed, watched the telly but as  it was the longest day in H I S T O R Y  (she’s not dramatic is she?!) she fell straight to sleep, snored a little, and got up at 6:15am the next day (a more reasonable time) fresh, and ready to conquer another day!