Circus Circus

Today was the last busy day before the Memorial Day holiday. This is because the fastest way the company ships is 2 day shipping and a shipment leaving today would arrive at its destination Friday, the last business day before the holiday. There was a situation today where an order was going to circus circus , a hotel in Las Vegas. The hotel is set up like a circus with a big tent and carnival games inside. They get most of their toys straight from the factories in China so there is no middleman like Classic Toy so they get the toys really cheap. But, for variety they get some from Classic Toy. There were supposed to be 128 pieces of the Rasta Banana going to Circus Circus, but the warehouse in LA only had 96 available as 32 were going to a small, local Mexican fair. Since Circus Circus is the much bigger and more profitable customer they diverted the 32 bananas from the Mexican fair to Circus Circus. They lose a small customer, but prevent disappointing a larger one.

Last Day of Workout Classes

Today was officially our last days of classes/working out that can be included in the booklet.  Since our booklet is done, we no longer have a need to workout because the information cannot go in the book. However, even though it was the last day we are taking classes, Anna and I are going to continue to go to Zumba classes on Thursday mornings because Zumba class is really fun.  We included some recipes in the booklet in our food/nutrition information section, so today we decided we would try some of them to make sure that they were edible so we wouldn’t print a gross recipe. So after working out we made a lunch consisting of the recipes from our booklet, and it was really good. I definitely liked the mango smoothie the best out of everything we made.  Also, since Cathy is now back in town we met with her to have her look over what we have been doing without her.  We actually have done a lot without her in town because we needed to; even though she was not here we still had to stay on schedule with the layout of the booklet so that it can get printed. I hope the booklet prints the same as it looks on the computer screen though.  

Wednesday

On Wednesday Anna and I took two classes in a row, which was really hard.  I was so incredibly tired for the second class that I did not like it as much.  We had actually taken the second class, Muscle Madness, before but at 6 in the morning and with a different teacher.  Even though the class was at six in the morning, I liked the first version of Muscle Madness we took; the music, workout, and teacher were all much more enjoyable.  Then we went straight to work on the booklet because we needed it to be completely finished for today.  Our sponsor had been out of town until today, and to get her opinion on the booklet, get it printed, and get it ready by next week we needed it to be done.  Thankfully after a long day of working on the booklet and the design and information and organization we FINISHED (well except the cover and back cover)! It was so exciting, and even though we still have the cover and back cover to do, the main part of the booklet is done.  It took a lot longer than I thought it was going to, but it is very relieving to actually be done with the writing for it.   

Helping in the Classroms

The past few days, I have worked a lot in the various classrooms of CLA, doing whatever I could to help the teacher. The way the school is set up, the students are assigned to a crew (a homeroom or admod) and go to all classes with the crew similar to what we did in middle school. They then have a partner crew, which is right across the hall, and these two crews share teachers. So, for the four main subjects, the students have two teachers. The math teachers also teach science and the english teachers also teach social studies. So the students go to their 4 core classes a day, but only see 2 teachers. What is interesting, is that the history and english classes are very aligned, for example: when the students were learning about Ancient Egypt in social studies, they were reading myths and other stories pertaining to Egypt in english. The math and sciences are a little more distinct, working on different projects at different times. Currently, in math, the students are creating a mini society, where they have created a currency and trade policies and will begin to learn about the financial aspect of a society. In science, the students are devoting all of their time to the community garden that they are building. All science classes venture out into the courtyard where they continue the hard work of building the flower beads and compost bin. It is remarkable that the students were able to completely design and think through the process of creating a garden of their own that they will use to produce vegetables for the community.

Exciting Meeting and Shadowing Ronnie from Jersey Shore

Today I attended a brief meeting in the morning with my sponsor on POP's for upcoming products. This meeting was especially exciting because the meeting was based off of the research I had done a few weeks ago. The first week of project I went to retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, etc) that sell Hoover products and took pictures of competing brand's POPs (Point of Purchase, the decals on the product that make claims) Brian had told me what a good job I had done on this project, but the real gratification came today during the meeting. The meeting was with a few high-up people in the finance, sales, and creative departments. Brian and his creative team used the book of POPs I compiled as leverage for Hoover spending more on POP creation and production. I know that the work I am doing for the company is very menial in difficulty but it felt really cool to see the affect of my report.

For the rest of the day I shadowed, Gino, the product manager of the wet division(carpet washers, carpet washing solutions, steam mops, and air purification systems). He is a very nice guy that is very good at his job and also happens to look like he walked straight off the set of Jersey Shore. He's very tan, extremely muscular, and super Italian. But regardless of him looking identical to Ronnie, we had a good day. He started off by taking me down to the plannagram room and showing me the different SKUs he manages in each of their big accounts (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc). He told me about the products, their features, how well they're selling compared to competition, and his role in managing and promoting them. We then went to two meetings. The first was just a logistical meeting with the creative director and the creative director's traffic controller. The system that was in place for people to request art work and images from the creative department was not efficient or effective so they just hired a traffic controller whose job is to develop a better system. The meeting I sat in on was to lay out what jobs Gino currently needed the creative team to complete for him. The creative team was going to use this to update the totally bogged down system. The next meeting I went to was with an engineer. Gino and him were discussing products that one of their Canadian retailers wanted to remanufacture and resell. For this to happen, Hoover has to issue reman boxes with different artwork and sometimes different manuals that encompass several similar SKUs. They were discussing which SKUs it would be profitable to execute a reman for and which to deny from the retailer.

Printing, Printing and More Printing

I've been very busy over the past few days, so this blog post should have been made a little while ago so to catch up....

I spent most of last week and the first few days of this week working on the Internet Accounts report that I mentioned in my last post. This involved printing the home page, privacy policy, customer service information, return policy, and the results from searching the term "hoover" from 214 different websites applying to maintain the legal rights to sell Hoover products online. This project was extremely time consuming and took up and ENORMOUS amount of paper. I temporarily moved my cubicle to the copy center where I printed out a small forest's worth of paper. Although the project was not all that fun I did get a chance to meet a lot of new people while in the copy center. That copy center houses the main printers, faxers, laminators, automatic hole punchers, and binding machines (all of which I am now expert at using) for the non-creative marketing department, the finance department and the sales department. It was interesting to get to talk to all of the different people who walk through there on a daily basis. When I finally finished the project, I had seven 4" three ring binders to turn in to my sponsor. It felt really good to be finally done with that project, and to not have to announce at another morning logistical meeting that I will be spending my day working on the Internet Account reports. It also feels good to know that that report will influence which online dealers (both for commercial and consumer) Hoover will allow to sell their products.

Finishing the Hawken Farm

We made tremendous progress in the last few days on the Hawken Farm. With the finishing touches completed on the chicken coop, we have finally shifted focus completely to the garden. Mr. Wilson brought a truck bed full of compost for us to spread across the beds to provide nutrients for the soil. The initial compost spread across roughly half of the beds, enough to start planting.

We had to move a patch of onions that was growing next to the peas before project even started because the two do not grow well together (companion planting, yo.) Instead, I moved the onions to the first two beds where I introduced tomatos as well. These plants have a synergistic effect on each other. Ms. Clark and Liam had started seeds of tomato, eggplant, and hot pepper, in planters which had now sprouted. We took the crates of these sprouts and transplanted them into the beds. I combined the eggplants with the hot peppers because hot peppers keep aphids and other pests that attack eggplant away.

The next day, Nate and I went to buy irrigation supplies to provide water to our beds. We bought 500' of hose and a 4 way spicket adapter to turn the standard tap on the side of our garden into designated irrigation pump. We brought the hose back to the garden and connected it to the tap and winded it around the garden, making sure that it covered every part of each bed. We then drilled small holes into the hose and capped the ends. When we turned the water on, the hoses filled with pressure and water sprinkled out of every hole we drilled. The irrigation system worked.

Mr. Wilson then came back with another truckload of compost which was spread across the rest of the garden. The hose that crossed over pathways was buried.

The entire farm is almost finished. We have to construct several raised beds and spread wood chips across the paths on top of the preexisting cardboard. Hawken Middle Schoolers are coming up to help us out on Friday. We are going to have them help us plant the rest of the beds and haul bricks for final touches on the pathways. Besides that, the farm is finished.