Hope everyone had a good holiday, but now we are getting back to the day to day. After vacation time and the holidays it is hard enough to get back to the swing of things. You eat so much more on the holidays, and you get to stay inside and relax. After those nice days reality comes and hits you in the face. You are back to work with no holiday break coming up for awhile. It also gets colder after Christmas. It is now freezing out, and the snow is piling up as we speak.  Everyone is back to work, but now we have to deal with the snow. It happens every winter in New England, but no one is ever truly ready for it.

R.H. Willson is open year round, rain or shine. That is what this month’s blog post is going to be about, the working conditions of the salvage yard in the winter months. The staff at R. H. Willson is committed to their customers.

Every time that it snows out, we have to clean the entire yard. The driveways need to be plowed and salted multiple times for our customers to safely enter and exit. A couple days later, we back plow the driveways. We use the loader with a plow on it because there is a lot of area to be covered. Back plowing is when we scrap the leftover snow and slush by dragging the plow backwards on the driveways. The building’s roofs and the cars all need to be shoveled. There are over 2,000 cars located at R. H. Willson so not all of them get shoveled off, but to sell the parts off the cars we need to be able to see the car. The crusher down back gets shoveled and whatever else it needs so it does not freeze. The building is concrete and metal so it takes awhile for the building to heat up, but all the heat comes from the recycled oil that goes into the furnace that recycles oil, which we talked about in another blog post. This is just what we go through with the equipment, but now we can talk about what the employees go through to get those parts.

The employees dress very warmly because the temperatures can get below zero. When someone goes out to get a part, they have to shovel off the cars and shovel the path to get to a certain vehicle. They do whatever is necessary to get to the car, but then they have to remove the part in the freezing temperatures with their bulky gloves and gear. This is just a normal routine for the staff because they have to get the parts for the customers.

Snow is snow, and there is a lot of it in New England during the winter months but we never know what the employees at business go through getting the inventory they need.

Every business is different, but you should take some time and think about how much really goes into getting a side mirror off a car in the dead of winter when there is a snow storm. These are the conditions that are inevitable, but we still have to work through them and produce the inventory necessary to sell.

This is just talking about the winter months, but every season has its obstacles for working indoor or outdoor. There are different precautions to take depending on the month and season. So take a moment and reflect because you never know what a business has to do to for even small parts.

A different approach then the normal blogs but with winter sometimes it is a good idea to discuss different situations that happen while working at any business especially salvage yards.