Randy. Math genius.

Randy is 26 years old and is autistic. He worked at my agency for 2 years cleaning tables, running the cash register in the cafeteria, and occasionally helping me in the warehouse with inventory. One of our projects is with Comcast. We sort the cables and wires off the service trucks. Our folks retie and send back power supplies that Comcast reuses saving them from being shredded by the recyclers. We have hundreds of pallets of cords in our warehouse. When I ask Randy to get me a count on pallets he will report back to me that we have 212 pallets of cords. He will let me know that 18 of those pallets are missing 1 case, 23 pallets are missing 2 cases, and 47 pallets are 4 high instead of 3. If I ask him what are the total cases he will immediately respond without looking at anything 5,724.

            When you meet Randy he will ask you your birthday. Mine is August 7, 1967. When I first met Randy he asked and immediately responded that 8/7/67 was a Monday. When I looked it up he was right. I’ve since seen this play out dozens of times. Not long ago I asked him how he knows what day it was. He explained that he knows it is x days until that date. Take the day of the week today add those days divide by 7 to find the day this year. Then knowing how many leap years you factor that in to get the day it was in 1967. He does this calculation in 2 seconds time and for good measure will throw in some random trivia about the hottest temperature on that date etc. Randy is a math genius and he is wiping down tables.

If Christine can’t do it…

Christine is in her late 40s and is the fastest worker you will ever find. No matter what the job she stays hyper focused and will tell you repeatedly she loves this job. When we retie power cords for Comcast Christine will do 700 in a 4 hour shift. The average is 200.

We place coupon labels on packaging for Kayem and she will do 2 to 3 times as many as the next worker; and the next worker is already great. When we look at projects for our folks we have “The Christine Rule”. If Christine can’t do it then it can’t be done.

Jeff’s 1 million remotes a year.

Jeff and I are the same age but other than both being fans of Gilligan’s Island we have had very different lives and opportunities. Jeff has grown up with mental retardation, a term we now just call MR or developmentally disabled. He loves Harley’s and wears a leather jacket, headband, vest. He puts temporary tattoos on his biceps. Every day when he walks in he comes and gives me a hug and tells me he loves me. He is only about 4’4” tall but has a huge heart and is a great worker. When we ran the Comcast project Jeff dissembled the remote controls for recycling. This involved removing 3 screws, cracking the remote in a small hand press, and separating the batteries, circuit board, and plastic. He would do over 4000 a day - that’s 8 every minute - and about 1 million a year. Nobody stays more focused and driven in his job than Jeff. He is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen.