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Jun
17

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9 Types of Job that Will Destroy Your Soul

Category: Interesting Facts, Retail Stories Tags: , Leave a Comment

Any of you could wind up in one of these jobs, at any moment, without realizing it. The shitty jobs I’m about to describe aren’t specific positions or industries — they’re situations. Some of you — hell, maybe even most of you — are already in one of them.

The thing is, when people try to think up the worst job possible, most of them go right to shit. As in, “It could be worse, you could be shoveling shit somewhere!” or “At least we’re not working in a sewer! In shit!” But that type of job isn’t as bad as you think — you actually get used to the smell of poop, the same as you acclimate to a job where you work in brutal heat or bitter cold.

Via Fenrisjaw.blogspot.com And of course the monsters.

But these jobs, on the list below? They’re the ones you never get used to, where the longer you do it, the more it eats away at you. So let’s take a moment to say a prayer for …

#9. The Punching Bag

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

The job where you have to face complaining customers, but you have no ability to fix their problem.

The hell of these jobs is that they’re not advertised as “complaint department.” If your job was to handle people’s complaints and help them, that could be fairly satisfying. People might actually thank you now and then.

Photos.com “Thank you so much — sorry I called you a cocksucker.”

No, I’m talking about jobs where you are between the public and whoever is fucking up constantly on the back end (and in some cases, the business itself is just shitty at what they do) but you have no power to do anything about it. All you can do is absorb their frustration and insults until they give up, because they finally ran out of ways to call you a worthless turd. Usually after threatening that they’ll get you fired.

For Example …

Think about the waiter or waitress at a restaurant where the quality of the food is terrible. When a customer complains, there is no correcting the order or sending it back to the kitchen — the replacement will be just as bad, because the restaurant’s owner is buying their meat from a Russian guy selling it out of the back of a van, and the cook is his 16-year-old nephew. But the customer will never get to curse out the owner, or the cook. So they’ll just take it out on you instead.

All night long.

Or, remember when the American government hired more than half a million college kids and other people off the street to do the census last year? Those kids faced abuse from hundreds of paranoid nutjobs believing Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theories about the census being used to send us all into concentration camps. What the hell do you even say to that? How do you reassure that person?

I could name examples all day, but to find the Punching Bags, you need to look no further than your last frustrating experience with customer service — they’ll be at the other end. Ever try to call UPS (or whatever courier you use) about a package that failed to arrive? You quickly find out that the person on the other end of the phone has no ability to contact the driver of the truck, and no knowledge of where your package is other than what you yourself could have found on their tracking website. So, presumably they spend their entire day as a sponge for complaints from angry customers (or, worse, crying customers talking about how the next dose of their kidney medicine is in that box).

Photos.com “Kathy, do you still have that noose I loaned you?”

They’re Punching Bags. Go easy on them.

#8. The Walking Dead

 

Also Known As:

The job that requires sleep deprivation. Long, irregular hours of tedium that your sleep patterns are physically incapable of adjusting to.

I’m not talking about jobs that won’t let you take a nap after you were up all night with the baby or a Dr. Who marathon. That’s every job. No, I’m talking about the jobs where torture-level sleep deprivation is a requirement (and it is literally a form of torture, used by everyone from the KGB to the CIA).

Photos.com And Windows Updates.

I’m talking about real exhaustion here, the kind that makes you feel sick. Your brain is trying desperately to shut down. A thick sludge of sleepiness is clogging up your thought pipes. And you have to push through it, night after night. You can’t get up and walk around, or get fresh air or entertain yourself. You just have to sit there, often in dead silence, and force yourself to stay awake for hours and hours and hours. It’s hell. It is a fucking living hell.

For Example …

Jobs like security guards who do night watch, sitting in a chair in a closed shopping mall and staring at non-moving images on security cameras for eight straight hours. No action, no book, no music, and if you get caught going to sleep, you’re fired.

Photos.com If one of those channels gets porn, it means you have to arrest someone.

Which is still a better outcome than long-haul truckers (who studies show get less than five hours sleep before driving for 10), since falling asleep at the wheel means somebody’s probably gonna die. But at least they can turn on the radio.

And make no mistake — your body never adjusts to an irregular sleep schedule (the recommended treatment for sleep problems caused by odd work hours is to get “a normal work and sleep schedule.” Thanks for the advice, fucker!).

But the worst part is what sleep deprivation does to you even when you’re not feeling sleepy. You can feel your IQ dropping. It’s like Edward Norton at the beginning of Fight Club — you walk around in a haze, you forget shit, you leave your keys in the lock. You start having conversations you don’t remember. And when you’re driving home, you are as dangerous as a drunk.

Via Katu.com Fatigued driver accident (yes, they survived, somehow).

And good luck getting sympathy when you complain to a friend that your job is so boring, you can fall asleep while doing it. That just sounds like you’re complaining about how easy your job is. At least, to anyone who’s never had to actually do it.

#7. The Girl

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

The lone representative of your gender in the workplace.

This could also be “The Guy.” It works either way. I suspect it’s harder being the lone girl in a shop full of dudes than being the lone guy in a female-dominated office, but mainly I say that because I want to see the Men’s Rights dipshits show up in the comments section.

For Example …

You’ll find it in every auto body shop with a secretary — one female working the desk and 10 greasy men working on engines (and don’t accuse me of stereotyping — 97 percent of secretaries are women, 99 percent of auto mechanics are men).

It’s no fun. There is the obvious sexual harassment element of it, which I barely need to touch on since you’ve been on the Internet and have seen what happens when a girl shows up on a male-dominated forum (“TITS OR GTFO”). It’s the same in real life, only it’s not as overt. But it is far more awkward, as there is no escaping it unless she quits. So the tension is sustained for eight or nine hours a day, every day, for as many years as she works there. And it’s a no-win; if The Girl reacts badly to a crude joke, she’s a bitch. If she replies to innuendo with innuendo of her own, then it’s, “Dude, I think she’s into me!”

Photos.com “I can name 200 pornos off the top of my head that start exactly like this.”

Every. Day.

Not that it isn’t awkward for, say, a male nurse who statistically will be the only penis owner in the vicinity. It creates a different though equally weird tension, because there are things women only say around other women (usually regarding what douchebags men can be). Also, there are plenty of members of both genders who regard any member of the other as the enemy. What I’m trying to say is that being a young dude in close quarters with a bitter, divorced mother of three is no fun.

#6. The Laughingstock

 

Getty

Also Known As:

The hard job that everyone laughs at you for having.

“So what do you do?”

“I’m a turkey masturbator.”

You can laugh. I did. But working at the kind of job that not only makes people laugh at you, but makes them tell the exact same fucking joke every time you bring it up, is awful. You eventually start lying about what you do, as if it’s illegal. Just to not hear that same goddamned joke again.

“I’m a turkey m- … carver. I carve turkeys.”

If you’re scoffing and saying people should learn to have a sense of humor about themselves, I’m guessing you’re not yet at that stage of life where you’re judged according to your job. If you’re 22 and you tell your peers, “I work at Chipotle, holding a sign while dressed as a burrito,” they’ll either laugh in sympathy, or say, “No shit, are they hiring? What are the hours like?”

But soon you’ll move onto a period of your life where you are defined entirely by what you do. It’s how the newspapers will refer to you if you ever make the headlines (“Pet Groomer Dies in Chimp Attack”), it’ll be the first thing you’re asked at parties, it’ll be the first thing girls ask you when you start flirting. The polite attempt to hide their disappointment when they decide they’re talking to a guy with a loser job is kind of crushing.

For Example …

God help you if you worked at a fast food restaurant in your youth, but kept getting promoted until, at middle age, you wound up a store manager. It doesn’t matter that you’re working 60 hours a week and taking in bonus money for keeping the store profitable — when you tell people you work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, you’re a loser with a picture of Colonel Sanders on your hat. Work anywhere in the newspaper business along the distribution chain? It doesn’t matter how high up the ladder you are, or if you needed a special license to drive the truck that ships the papers — to everyone else you’re a “paperboy.”

I know a guy who waited three years on a waiting list to get a job as a mailman — it’s a tough job to get because it’s a sweet government job with good benefits, and you have to pass all sorts of exams and background checks. But to this day, if he tells people what he does, they’ll make a joke about “going postal.” “Haha! You’re not going to shoot us, are you! Do you want some of my lithium?” The same joke, over and over and over.

Via Treehugger.com “You know, I wasn’t going to — but that sounds like a great idea.”

Though that’s not as bad as working at, say, a sperm bank. Or any job that involves sex in any capacity. It’s fucking 2011, but if you are connected to the porn industry in any way (even on the billing or Web hosting side), you have to lie about your job as if you’re a drug dealer. And it’s a lie you have to tell constantly.

All because society has decided that certain jobs, regardless of skill level, pay or difficulty, are to be ridiculed.

Photos.com In some areas, these guys make more than most of the people reading this article.

#5. The Cog

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

Endless, mindless repetition that could just as easily be accomplished with a machine.

I’m not just talking about boring jobs here — most jobs are boring. Starbucks is boring, but at least the drinks are different from customer to customer, and you can practice making designs in the foam. No, I’m talking about a task that takes five minutes to learn, must be repeated five thousand times a day and never changes. You stand in one spot, you perform the same task, over and over and over.

For Example …

You’ve watched one of those “how stuff is made” type shows, where they visit a factory like this one where they make tasty brownies. And while the job of the “pour the brownie batter into the pan” lady looks boring …

… there is still a fun and satisfying aspect to it. She probably has to worry about the consistency and temperature and amounts of the batter, and she gets to watch her empty pan turn into a bunch of delicious brownies, and she can pretend she’s Willy Wonka.

But then at the very end of the assembly line are the poor bastards whose job it is to just stack the brownies into boxes:

Their faces say it all.

All day long. The same number of brownies in every box. An endless stream of boxes that never, ever stop. Even in an automated world, the workforce is absolutely full of these jobs — it’s still cheaper to make a low-paid human pack boxes than to buy an expensive machine. Here’s another video, this from a Pringles factory. Check out the guy whose job it is to stand in front of the Pringles chute and straighten the rows of chips so they slip neatly into the tubes:

Now, some stressed out CPA with a hectic office is reading this and saying, “Shit, I’d love to be the guy who puts those little blue stickers on the bananas at the Chiquita factory. That’d be like a vacation to my ulcer-ridden ass.”

Bullshit. It’s like thinking being stranded on a desert island would be a nice break from the daily grind. It’d be peaceful for about an hour, and then you’d start to go insane. Your brain is a supercomputer containing an entire universe of wonders and creativity, and you’re going to make it stare at a row of chips for eight or 12 or 16 hours at a stretch? Oh, and it’s a failure-only job. If you do it perfectly, no one notices. But if you fuck up and the chip tube loader jams, you catch hell.

And when it comes time to ask for a promotion, or to look for a new job, what do you tell them you did? What skill did you learn? How did you better yourself? What job does this qualify you for? What interesting stories do you have to tell when you get together with friends? You’d start looking at that flow of chips and imagining the best years of your life flowing away, one Pringle-shaped moment at a time.

Photos.com

 

#4. The Lie Bot

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

The job where you have to lie right to people’s faces, to make them buy things.

Some of you immediately said, “What, like lawyers and politicians?” But those are careers. Big, big difference. Those people choose that, and went to school for it.

No, I’m talking about jobs. The type of position you take just to pay the bills until you can start your rap career.

Via Entertainmentopia.com

For Example …

Almost any sales job, for one. Think about the poor bastard at Best Buy getting paid hourly to pretend Monster brand cables aren’t a scam. Like working on cars? You’ll be shocked to find how many repair shops pressure you into padding the bill with bullshit repairs and worse. Maybe you took a general customer service job at a phone bank, but then they contracted out to some shady software company that has you cold calling people to get them to buy some malware-loaded bullshit that will “speed up their computer.”

And while the “sleazy used car salesman” is a stereotype, it’s not like they have a sign up front that says, “Now hiring shitheads.” Car sales is one of the precious few jobs on planet Earth where you can come in with no experience but still make decent money. Yet, part of doing the job is learning to perform that staged bullshit where you pretend to consult with a manager to get the customer a lower price.

Photos.com “He said, ‘Go fuck yourself.'”

You’ll find that lots of jobs that sound great in the classifieds secretly have “being a shithead” in the job description — that’s how they find people willing to do it. MLM sales, door to door sales, telemarketing jobs, all can have you selling shady, shamefully overpriced or downright fraudulent bullshit.

And what makes those jobs even more awesome is that you in no way restrict the lies to gullible rich people who could maybe afford to lose the money you’re stealing. The rich people have lawyers — you stay away from them. No, the job of the Lie Bot is usually to hustle single moms out of next months’ diaper money.

Via Singlemomfinancialhelp.com Though I could probably get a couple hundred bucks for that kid.

#3. The Rat in a Cage

 

Via Batguys.com

Also Known As:

The manager or supervisor who has no authority to actually manage the employees under him or her, yet is responsible for their performance.

There is this huge, obvious, yet shockingly common flaw in modern businesses. You’ll have the employees who actually make the stuff or perform the service. Then right above them is a supervisor (you), who is ultimately responsible for the performance of those employees (or at least, you’ll catch hell when they slack off). But you do not have the power to fire them. Or reprimand them or reward them or punish them or give them the smack with the back of your hand that would send them tumbling to the floor that you dream of giving them each and every night.

Getty “Gabe” from The Office is one.

For Example …

Maybe you’re at a family business, but you, the supervisor, are not a member of the family. But the kid working under you, the one who is scanning his balls into the copier, is a member of the family and is thus untouchable. Or, maybe you don’t have firing authority because of some complicated union situation.

Or, maybe the workers are working in your department but not for your department. Say you’re a supervisor in Sales, and the guy the IT department sent over to work on your computers is a dipshit. So he’s cursing while you’re on the phone with clients, he’s drawing boners on your family photos, he’s dicking off and meanwhile, you can’t use your computer to do your job. And you can’t say anything because while you’re a supervisor, you’re not his supervisor.

Sure, you can complain to his supervisor, but you can’t make him take action — that guy is at the exact same level as you. Maybe he’s friends with the dipshit, or maybe all the IT guys look out for their own, and all the next day you’ll hear them chuckling about it when you pass their office.

In other cases, it’s just a matter of the person who could actually fire or suspend incompetent workers not working in the same building, or even in the same city, as the dipshits. You send your complaints up the ladder and they disappear into the clouds somewhere. Then, one day you realize the shitty worker you’re complaining about has worked there longer than you and that 20 years from now, they’ll still be there.

In the end, all you can do is verbally compliment the performers and beg the incompetents to do better. That, and continue to twist your stomach in knots every time they screw up, watching them ruin your career, utterly powerless to stop it.

Photos.com Your life … totally under his control.

But in case it sounds like I was being too hard on the IT guy back there, let’s hear it for …

#2. The Assistant Cromulationist

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

The highly technical job that is impossible to explain to those both inside and out of the workplace.

If you used to watch Friends, you remember the running joke about how nobody knew what exactly Chandler did for a living. He was always exasperated by this (“I told you, it’s statistical analysis and data reconfiguration!”).

Like the Laughingstock, the person with this type of job physically cringes at the thought of having to answer the “So what do you do?” question, and eventually invents a fake job title or a ridiculously dumbed down version (“I work on computers”) for conversation purposes. And if awkward conversation was the only problem, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. The real problem is when none of their co-workers understand their job either.

Getty “I … well … I put stuff in water.”

For Example …

We have a disproportionately computer literate audience, and I know a lot of you aspire to work in the field. Well, some of you are going to wind up as the one-man computer tech support team in an office full of old timers who still regard computers as a suspicious, yet necessary form of black magic. Maybe you’ll be the guy who maintains the online orders, in a department where everybody else hits the road and sells the old-fashioned way.

This is any job where the other employees’ task is labor intensive or requires “real world” work, and you’re just sitting there “playing on your computer.” That’s the key; because they don’t understand what you do, and because you aren’t capable of explaining it so that they’d understand, they tend to assume you’re just jerking off all day.

Photos.com Even if they’re right.

So, they start treating you like dead weight. When profits are tight and it comes time to cut staff, everyone will point the finger at you. If lovable old Frank in Sales gets the ax instead, everyone will resent you even more (“They fire a hard-working veteran like ol’ Frank, but they keep Dave just because he can use the fancy computer machine?!? He don’t even wear a tie to work!”)

And that’s assuming that the people doing the firing also aren’t confused about your value to the company. If your job is, for instance, to prevent a problem that the average person isn’t even aware of, then good luck explaining that to the guy who has to make layoff decisions based on how much profit you’re bringing in. Think of the frustrated employees in Office Space trying to justify what they do to “the Two Bobs” (the two downsizing consultants, who both happened to be named Bob).

V

ia Cio.com And most companies employ a couple of them.

Then again, being a Bob isn’t exactly a sweet gig …

#1. The Bob

 

Photos.com

Also Known As:

The one whose job it is to make everyone else’s jobs harder, or to recommend they be fired.

On some level, we all realize there is often a big fucking gulf between what workers enjoy, and what actually makes a company profitable. Some of what the company needs the workers to do is going to piss the workers off, and somebody has to make them do it. And that’s fine, as long as that guy is the boss. But that’s often not how it works. Often the person cracking the whip is a Bob.

Via Oregonstate.edu “How do you spell ‘Fuck off, Chad’?”

This is an employee who is either on the same level of the rest of the staff, or they’re temporarily elevated to some kind of task force (to raise quality or whatever), or they’re outside consultants brought in to shape up the operation, like in the Office Space example.

But one way or the other, if you’re a Bob, you’re a traitor. The employees don’t work for you, your name isn’t on the door, you don’t write the checks, you don’t have the ability to pay them a sweet bonus. Yet, you have the power to make their lives miserable.

Getty “I’ll be working with you for the next couple of weeks. Where can I put my giant face?”

For Example …

I’m going to use a term here. Some of you won’t recognize it. The rest of you will reflexively feel your genitals crawl up into your body:

ISO 9000.

ISO 9000 is a certification that businesses can get that declares they have their shit together. Which sounds great, but from the employee point of view, ISO 9000 means a task that used to take two mouse clicks now takes two mouse clicks and three pages of exhaustive forms explaining what they just did. It’s endless, hellish record-keeping. Getting certified means ISO 9000 consultants come into the office and hover over every employee, constantly reminding them to log their time and fill out their forms.

Exactly 100 percent of the things the consultant is telling the employees to do involve making their job much, much harder. When they leave, ISO compliance will be handed off to someone within the company. And everyone will want to murder them. They’re now a Bob.

Photos.com “No, he’s just hovering around, staring at me like a fucking idiot.”

But the key is you could get promoted to a Bob job tomorrow. Maybe you’ll get asked to work in Quality Assurance, recording and reporting your fellow workers’ errors. Maybe you’ll be put on a team to create a report about the department’s “efficiency.”

Or, maybe you’ll have to go review the work some other company is doing for yours on a contract basis, and you’ll be the Bob over there. Like the toy company representatives who hang around movie sets and make sure that from the script stage on, the characters will make good action figures. You know that artists and storytellers love to hear that shit. “Sure, the character is endearing and resonates with the audience and has a compelling story arc, but you need to give it hands so we can sell accessories for it to hold.”

What are they going to do, complain to their boss? Their boss is the one who paid you to come tell them that. And you’re just doing your job.

That’s what I guess you have to keep in mind, because a whole lot of the people on this list could be spun off into an article about “People at Work You Want to Murder but Can’t Because It’s Illegal.” Just remember, they’re not villains. They’re just people trapped in shitty jobs.

 

Sourced from cracked.com

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Jan
24

By

The walmart story by Joe the peacock. Please read…brilliant

Category: Retail Stories, Walmart Tags: , Leave a Comment


I was in my first (only) year of college and working for Roadway Package System on the overnight shift. RPS was a cheap knockoff of FedEx or UPS, only without all the customers and safety regulations, as we had at least fifteen employees out on workers’ comp at any given time. What those guys were doing when they got hurt, I’ll never know, because all I ever saw any of us do was basically sit around and move a few boxes here and there to create the illusion that we deserved seven dollars an hour. My job function consisted mostly of breaking open the occasional Nerf shipment and “playtesting” the toys all night. Sure, that stuff was meant for someone else, but the company’s insurance would cover it. It was free Nerf, as far as I was concerned.

I decided to quit RPS one night (and by “quit,” I mean to say that I physically demeaned the five-two late-night security guard by rubbing his head and calling him “cutie”; this was met rather quickly by the blunt end of his Maglite and a veritable honor guard of an escort out of the building). Since I had lost my scholarship the very first quarter of school due to sleeping in class all day—because of late-night work, oddly enough—and I still had the futile intention to graduate, I was desperate for a late-night solution to my funds-to-tuition ratio. I had to do something for money. I thought about whoring my body out to dirty old men or selling hash made from yard grass and pencil shavings to high school kids, but I felt that as a future writer, I needed, for once in my life, to indulge in something truly dark and evil. Something from which immeasurable pain and embarrassment would come, so that I could have an experience to draw upon for inspiration in the future. Naturally, working at Wal-Mart was the first thing that came to mind.

I heard about the position from a friend of mine who, at his request, shall remain nameless. He was working the early-morning shift at the time. He explained that the electronics department needed a full- time employee on the overnight shift because the last person who worked there was caught masturbating to a Cindy Crawford workout tape at two A.M. while the other employees were in the break room. He could have gotten away with it; there were only two working security cameras in the whole store, one in the shoe department and the other at the customer service counter. But he chose to do it in the actual department, where customers rarely—but sometimes do—shop.

I decided to give Wal-Mart a shot. I showed up for the pre-interview, which was basically a screening of a poorly produced security and procedure video. After that hearty thirty-minute nap, I was huddled into a corner of the room with a manager to begin the actual interview. Believe it or not, the interview process for Wal-Mart was pretty thorough. But they paid six dollars an hour — not as much as RPS, but still, a fortune at the time. It was worth it, since the job entailed wearing a blue smock, cleaning up after dullards, and answering, for the hundredth time in an hour, questions whose answers that should be common sense.

After spending half my day on the interview and a drug test, then the two weeks it took to call the references and check out my background, I was accepted into the ranks of the Sam Walton elite: I became Joe “The Overnight Electronics Department Employee” Peacock.

To feel the full impact of such a job title, you must understand one crucial fact about life—and this fact will remain constant forever—no one normal works the overnight shift, anywhere. This is especially evident at Wal-Mart, where not only are you working overnight in a gigantic wasteland of a career path, you are doing so alongside people who clean department store floors and stock liquid Dawn dish soap and various salty Golden Flake snacks on shelves eight hours a night for a living, all in backwoods Georgia. These people weren’t what one would consider to be members of the conversational elite.

My first few weeks on the job were rife with frustration. Because I was the new kid, and because I didn’t belong in the social structure created by the employees, I ended up the victim of several pranks. I was told that the electronics person on the overnight shift had to cover for the pet department, which was at the opposite end of the store. I was also informed that during my downtime, I was to pitch in and help other departments stock their wares. It was common in those first few weeks to find me putting away stock that wasn’t in my department while being paged back to my department or to the pet department every ten minutes for customers who, according to the employee who had paged me, had mysteriously just left.

Between stocking bars of Ivory, running to my department every ten minutes for phantom customers, and jogging over to the pet department to scoop fish for people who had no intention of purchasing them, I was pretty worn out every day when my shift ended. It was about a month before I found out that neither the shelf stocking nor the fish were my responsibility, and because my department was home to some of the most expensive and easily shopliftable items in the store, leaving it was a huge no-no. For all of my hard work and willingness to pitch in around the various departments, I received a big fat “needs improvement” on my first employee review.

Once I learned the truth about my extra duties and subsequently told those who’d asked me to do them to fuck themselves, things kind of leveled out and became simple for me. My daily routine ran as follows: I would arrive at the store at about ten P.M., help the third-shift person clean up, receive my stock about midnight, put it all away by one, and kick back and watch the brand-new digital satellite TV network, or some of the latest releases on this new DVD technology while doing my homework until six A.M., when I left the store for class. I was becoming quite happy with my routine, despite the fact that I was surrounded by undereducated redneck mollusks who, while I was watching movies and the MTV2 network, were busy stocking detergent and mops that, a few months prior, they’d had a gullible college kid do for them while they sat in the back room and turned the walls yellow with their three-pack-a-day tobacco habit. They kinda got pissed.

As time progressed, my manager started noticing discrepancies on my inventory reports every morning. Every night when I took over the shift, I had a little note that reminded me to check the battery count or verify that the film count matched up with the printout, because the rack was off by one or two. I would count and count again, and the counts would match exactly with the ones on the inventory printout I had just received from the inventory software. It baffled me why I had to keep verifying counts on the inventory my mananger had apparently counted that morning, but I chalked it up to busywork. I didn’t spend too many cycles wondering why the almighty computer system at a discount department store was screwing up numbers. I figured, It’s one goddamn roll of film in one Wal-Mart. It costs four bucks. Our profit last year was in the tens of millions.

But this was not a problem that faded away easily. More and more inventory began disappearing overnight from my department with no apparent cause. Over time, a roll of film turned into several rolls, which then graduated to video games, printer cartridges, and eventually a television. It truly made no sense to me, but every single evening I would get increasingly terse notes that stated that certain areas of our inventory were experiencing unaccounted-for reductions. I would watch the department like a hawk: Not a single customer made it in or out of the department on my shift without my gaze glued directly to them, and I never once saw any of them scanning the area nervously while shoving a television in their knickers. The morning-shift employee arrived at five-thirty for register count and shift change, so the theft couldn’t be taking place between shifts. The disappearances were absolutely not happening. Nonetheless, inventory was vanishing from the shelves every morning and reappearing every evening when I started my shift.

One morning I was confronted by the overnight manager. I had no clue what was taking place. I walked over to the offending aisle of printer cartridges and demonstrated for him that the count matched EXACTLY with what was on his new morning printou . . . Hmm.

That was odd. It actually was off by one.

No one had even come into my department that evening. There was no way that any of the inventory could have left the department that evening. Something, somewhere, stank. Badly.

After a few days of asking around on the overnight shift, the morning manager received horrible reviews of my performance from the other employees. The part that fried my turkey was the fact that the overnight manager didn’t speak out and back me up. He supported the claims of the overnight staff that not only was I lazy but I was also pilfering the stock for personal gain. I was furious! I did my job and I did it well! I mean, come on, how can one suck at watching free satellite TV?

I pleaded my case to the morning manger, to no avail. Unfortunately, when an entire overnight shift at a Wal-Mart hates you and their opinions get confirmation from the shift manager, anything you say to anyone who isn’t there to see the comedy of errors probably won’t believe you.

Which leads to a deeper, darker blemish on my record than my having worked at Wal-Mart: I, Joe the Peacock, was fired from Wal-Mart. I would say only a retard could get fired from Wal-Mart, but this isn’t true: Even the door greeter with Down’s syndrome who once bit a female customer and refused to let go was still employed. I was completely mortified.

I visited the store the following week to pick up my final paycheck. I met up with that nameless friend who’d suggested I take the job in the first place. He had heard all the rumors and gossip, and fortunately, he was pretty tight with a few of the overnight employees. Conversation ensued, and I discovered that, in an attempt to frame me for theft, some of those magnificent meatheads had been using the inventory gun to go in and scan items, then increase the inventory by one or two in the computer every morning, just in time for the inventory printout. That explained the unaccounted-for shrinkage in inventory. Pretty crafty, I must say, especially since at that time the inventory system didn’t record what time a change was made if it had been entered manually. It only paid attention when things were scanned in from the truck or scanned out at the register and went out the door. And because I had no idea what was happening, I never thought to compare one count sheet to another.

The worst part of the entire conversation came when it was revealed that the overnight manager was in on the whole scam as well. He thought it was funny.

The only validation of my personal character came when I asked him what I had done to piss them off so badly. He replied, “Dude, you didn’t do anything. These are simple people who are not worthy of your hatred. You don’t belong at a place like Wal-Mart. Everyone knows it. One day you will become a famous writer and amass a huge following. People will adore you and look at you as an influence for themselves and their children. Statues will be erected in your honor. A car will be named after you. You will be able to transmute lead into gold, and you will evolve into pure energy and understand the true nature of God.” Or something like that—because he asked not to be named, he can’t refute the quote.

Needless to say, I was a bit miffed. I felt that a company that would engage in these nefarious practices deserved some heavy-duty payback. After our conversation, I went home to plot out one of the most glorious plans for revenge ever conceived—well, maybe not ever conceived by, like, everyone, but definitely the most glorious ever conceived by me.

The day after Thanksgiving is, of course, the single busiest shopping day of the year. Every single Wal-Mart in the nation is swamped with parents hoping to find great deals on stupid toys that their children will destroy within four minutes of opening the package. This fact does not stop the parents from coming in droves to hand over their hard-earned money for the cheaply made knickknacks.

As the guy who’d set up just about everything in that department during the months I worked there, I had a few small advantages. For instance, I was the only one who knew the lockout codes for the satellite system (then called USSB), which was located in the demo cabinet. Along with the satellite system was the demo DVD player (which could also play AVI video CDs that could be made on a personal computer) and demo VCR. Incidentally, I was the only employee who even knew there were keys for that cabinet, because when I’d set it up, I’d grabbed the keys and put them on my key ring. We never locked the cabinet, so I quickly forgot that the keys even existed. I happened to keep those keys after I left the company (the only copy of those keys). I also happened to be the only one with all the passwords to all the demo PCs in the department.

My major advantage was the knowledge that, while there were two department phones on the counters near the registers, there was a third line that was active but unused under the main CD rack in the center of the department. Back in those days, the phone/intercom system wasn’t digital; it was your basic everyday analog line.

Thanksgiving night, the store closed for the evening so the employees could go home and have dinner with the family. But they reopened after midnight for employees to prep for the upcoming onslaught of bargain hunters. I sneaked into the store through the gardening department and began working on my plan, which was especially easy, since the morning manager had never gotten around to filling my position, and almost everyone except the custodians showed up late due to the holiday. I thought it was going to be difficult, but no—the store was my playground.

First, I glided over to the unlocked demo machine cabinet. I attacked the satellite system, locking out every channel except for the Hot Network, a hard-core pornography channel for which I then ordered a full day of programming. I inserted in the DVD player a special AVI video CD I had burned on my home machine, and then I put a special VHS tape into the VCR. I turned off all the units, so the TV screens showed only black. I turned the volume on every TV to max, locked the demo cabinet, and stole all the remotes for the systems from the front drawer.

I moved over to the PCs and changed a few settings, then rebooted them to lock in the passwords. Finally, I took a cordless telephone from the department and plugged it in to the aforementioned vacant store phone jack under the CD rack, hiding the base of the unit with boxes of inventory. I ran over to the pharmacy section to plug in the remote charger and phone receiver so it would be fully charged for the next morning. Everything in place, I left the store with a gigantic smile on my face.

Six A.M. rolled around. The newspaper flyers had advertised special early-bird prices for certain items for weeks on end, and droves of bargain shoppers packed the store. There were lines for each department, lines for checking out . . . It was a madhouse. During the chaos, I breezed through the store, blending in with the crowds. Since the morning crew was on staff, not a single person recognized me. I went over to my rigged electronics department to do a final survey of the area. All the televisions were on, screens black, with a small message at the bottom of the screen that said “signal unavailable.” All of the demo PCs had rolled over to their screensavers, which scrolled in blue text on a red background I AM A LUCKY COMPUTER! TAKE ME HOME! Moving the mouse or using the keyboard would not disable the screensaver, since it had a password. Everything looked ready.

I ran over to my secret hiding area in the pharmacy, the only department not completely ravished by the holiday shopping crowd, and pulled out the cordless phone. The batteries were good, and when I entered the code for an overhead page and blew into the receiver, my puffs were clearly audible over the intercom. It was time for the festivities to begin.

Using the paging system I had just hijacked, I announced in a clear and resounding tone: “Greetings, Wal-Mart holiday shoppers! Thank you so much for coming out this wonderful day to take advantage of our special deals! One of our unadvertised specials is taking place right now! For the next thirty minutes in the electronics department, if you see a computer with a message scrolling across that says ‘I am a lucky computer! Take me home!,’ that model is seventy percent off the already low sale price! These computers are first come, first serve, so hurry to the electronics department, and as always, thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.”

The stampede began. I made my way along with hordes of bargain hunters to the electronics department to witness the lucky shoppers search for the computers that were on “sale.” What a lucky day! Every single machine had a demo model scrolling the magic phrase! I figured that Wal-Mart’s policy was to honor any advertised price, and in-store announcements qualified as an advertisement, so my ploy would put a gigantic dent in their normal operational activity. But that was frosting on my cake. My actual intention was not to screw Wal-Mart on the price of their crappy Acer and Packard Bell computers; it was to build an audience.

As the department reached a capacity bordering on critical, I pulled out my stolen remotes for the demo units and turned on all three of them. The top row of televisions, at full volume, flipped to images from the satellite system, which was locked on hard-core pornography; the middle tier showed images from the VCR, which contained a movie entitled Where the Boys Aren’t: Sorority Sleepover; and the bottom row played footage from the DVD system, which contained a video CD full of downloaded German Scheiße films from the darkest reaches of Usenet.

There is no way I can describe the resulting chaos better than you are probably imagining it, so I will leave it alone, mentioning only that I barely managed to crawl out of the store because I was doubled over from laughter. What a happy holiday season I had that year.

I heard later from my nameless friend that the “wall o’ filth” played at full volume for nearly an hour, since the department was so packed with spectators that employees could barely move through to the demo cabinet. They obsessed over unlocking it instead of simply turning off the televisions. Overall, the panic and unrest went on for half the day. Months later, after I was well past my balloon-twisting career and starting into the dot-com world, my nameless friend brought up the prank and, through his chuckles, told me the employees still hadn’t figured out how I’d hijacked the paging system. I was tempted to go to the store and see if the cordless phone was still plugged in so I pull the entire stunt once again.

The best part of it all: The store accidentally paid me for another two weeks after I had been fired. A few weeks after mailing me the check for the work I didn’t clock in for, they sent a letter explaining that there had been an error in the payroll system and requesting that I send the money back. I wrote the word Scheiße with a chocolate bar on the letter and mailed it back, wondering if they would get the joke. I then put the money in a tech-heavy stock portfolio that, in 2001, tanked. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.

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