I first heard about the Wal-Mart position from a friend of mine who was working the early morning shift at the famous discount retailer. 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 2 AM while the other employees were goofing off in the break room.
Sadly, I'm not kidding.
I was in college and needed the money, so I showed up one Wednesday at 2:00 pm for the Wal-Mart interview. Believe it or not, the interview process for Wal-Mart was pretty thorough, especially considering the job paid $6.00 an hour and entailed wearing a blue schmock, cleaning up after dullards, and answering the same questions hundreds of times per hour.
Customer: "Excuse me, do you have a toy department?"
What I would think: "Do we have a TOY DEPARTMENT!? What the hell kind of question is that?! This is WAL-MART, flapjack. Can you not see the gigantic blue and yellow sign hanging up when you walk in the door that says 'TOYS'?!?"
What I would say: "Yeah, sure. It's down there."
Anyway, after a grueling two-hour interview, a drug test, multiple calls to my references, and a two-week waiting period, I was finally accepted into the ranks of the Sam Walton elite: I became Joe "The Overnight Electronics Department Employee" Peacock.
The job was a complete nightmare.
First, NO ONE NORMAL works the overnight shift ANYWHERE. This is ESPECIALLY true at Wal-Mart, a gigantic wasteland of career options, where you are working alongside people who restock Liquid Dawn dish soap and Golden Flake snacks eight hours a night for a living. IN GEORGIA. Surprisingly, this conglomeration of educationally inept rednecks had quite an elaborate social structure built into their little group, one that did NOT readily include people who pronounce the word "green" with only one syllable.
 The first few weeks were extremely frustrating. Because I was the new kid, and because I did not belong among their kind, I ended up the victim of several "funny" little pranks. For instance, I was told that the electronics person had to cover for the pet department, which was on the opposite end of the store. I was also informed that whenever possible, I should pitch in and help other departments stock their wares. It was common to find me putting away stock that wasn't in my department, being paged back to my department every ten minutes for customers who, according to the paging person, had mysteriously "just left." It was about a month before I found out that neither the Ivory nor the fish were my responsibility, and for all of my hard work and willingness to "pitch in," I received a big fat "Needs Improvement" on my one-month probationary report.
Once I learned the truth about my "extra duties" and subsequently told those who asked me to do them to "go fuck themselves," things became quite simple for me. I would arrive at the store about 10:00 PM, help the third-shift person clean up, receive my stock about midnight, put it all away by 1:00, then kick back and watch digital satellite TV or DVDs while doing my homework until 6:00 AM, when I left the store for class. I was becoming quite happy with my routine, despite the fact that I was surrounded by uneducated redneck mollusks who, while I was watching movies and the brand new MTV2 network, were busy stocking detergent and mops that they, just a few months prior, had a gullible and eager-to-please college kid do for them while they sat in the back room and smoked.
Which is when things started going downhill. |
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