Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

I'm really bored so I'm gonna talk about that last job I stayed a long time with. If you haven't guessed by now, it was with Walmart. --and if you really want to get technical about it, I was really with them for more like 8 years overall if you don't count the time I spent on and off. I had to break away from them a few times moving from Florida to Texas and back again and wasn't able to transfer, but always managed to get re-hired by them almost immediately after.

"Walmart!?" you might say. "Why, that's a terrible company! No wonder it was such ****! Why didn't you just get a better job?" you might ask. Well, here's the kicker: When you have no money at all and you're desperate for work, you have to apply everywhere. I must have sent out hundreds of applications, praying to a God I don't believe in Spoiler(yup there's the problem right there God ******* hates me for not loving him ayup) for anything better than Walmart. Spoiler(My favorite part about all of this is spending hours filling out psych evaluation questions where I must pretend to be a mindless subservient robot in all of my answers.)

I managed to get into a few interviews with some other places, like an Amscot in Orlando. It was a two hour drive from home, but I shaved off all my hair and put on deodorant and a tie and my best impression of a fine, upstanding gentleman. Well, like all other non-Walmart interviews, it ended with a lot of fake smiles and politeness and a "we'll call you" as I walked back to my car, humiliated, wondering why I had just done that to myself and wasted so much precious fuel to get there and back.

You see, here in reality, finding a job is a heck of a lot like finding a girlfriend. First you need to look for someone who's actually looking for someone. Then you need to meet all of their standards and needs. Then you need compete and be better than all the hundreds of other people who are after the same job. You need consent from the employer to take up a job with them. You can't just take from them and hope you don't leave a mark. What does that leave you with? It leaves you with Walmart. That's what it leaves you with. When nobody else will call you, Walmart will.

It doesn't matter who you are. If you get a call from Walmart for an interview you can bet your *** they are going to hire you on the spot, as soon as you arrive. You get an interview, but it doesn't even matter what you say or how you answer the questions. They need someone RIGHT NOW and it might as well be you. The interview itself is always the hardest part, because they'll ask you all the same kinds of questions as anyone else, but you know that they aren't taking you seriously-- that they just need another warm body to fill a hole with-- but you do your best to play along and act like it's all serious business before they ask you how much you think your pay should be like you have some kind of say in that and you almost lose your composure to all the white-hot rage you are feeling underneath.

From this point on the experience kind of varies by location. Here's some advice for anyone who finds themselves forced to work for Walmart: Don't learn how to do anything. Don't offer to cut keys, or mix paint, or issue fishing licenses. When they hand you a Telxon portable computer/scanner device, tell them you don't have a login set up with it yet Spoiler(because you probably actually won't anyway.) Just don't. You will take on so much more responsibility and nothing else will change. If you do this, on top of all your regular work, you will be paged constantly to hurry all over the store to take care of impatient and ungrateful customers who all feel they're entitled to being treated like ******* royalty by you, the lowly Walmart peasant. You will get payed exactly the same as you would as the guy who has been there for ten years who never touched any of that ****.

You won't get treated any better, and most of all, you WILL NOT MOVE UP. If all of the management in your store suddenly died together in a fiery crash aboard the same airplane, YOU are not the person to replace them. They will bring in people from outside the store, even outside the company. You are a peasant. They are nobles. You should be happy and feel honored to be making as much as you do because you are all apart of one big happy Walmart family-- family in the kind of sense that you are their dog or cat, and you are serving people who are better than you.

I could write about this all day, but I have better things to do. SpoilerNot really

:DRYVRS Episode 1, or "This is how Home Alone 3 should have gone." NSFW Spoiler

Yes, that is Macauley Culkin.

You forgot the bit where you hold it sideways, gangster style.

So you do the bare minimum work necessary to fill a job slot, make no effort to increase your skills, and in fact actively work to avoid doing so, and you wonder why you're not moving upward. Hmmm...



And they all just magically became nobles to your peasantness. It was a birthright. Or blind luck. Or something. Where do you suppose they came from? What did they do differently that made them the people the bosses turn to when they need a responsible skilled person to take some kind of position of power/responsibility in their workforce? Maybe you should figure that out and do that instead? Just a suggestion.


Look. I'm not proposing that rising through the ranks of Walmart is a great business plan, but it does look as though at least part of your problem is your own attitude towards work. You're starting out with the "I can't succeed, so there's no point in trying" assumption. Um... And as long as you think that, you've pretty much guaranteed that you never will.



Again, the key point is to figure out how they got to be "better than you", and try to do the same things. Have you stopped and talked to those who are earning more than you and asked about how they did it? Maybe express an interest in doing the same? You might be surprised at how they aren't the evil enemy at all, and will be more than willing to help mentor you, and if you actually spend the effort, then it'll be your name they turn to when they need a position to fill that pays more than door greeter. But you will never ever ever get there just sitting around doing the bare minimum and making no effort to get noticed except for when you ***** up.

Advancement is as much about social skills as physical job skills. Especially when you're at/near the bottom, and you don't yet have those job skills. You get them by talking to people who have them and learning from them. Sitting in housewares trying to avoid attracting too much attention from your manager while slacking through a shift to collect a meager paycheck will result in you doing nothing but earning a meager paycheck. Forever.

Edited, Dec 18th 2015 7:17pm by gbaji

[:sigh:] He was using his experience to show what to do, as opposed to what he had done. He was passing along his hard won wisdom.

Reading comprehension fail on your part gbaji. As per usual.

D'awww. Looks like you strained yourself trying to understand what I was saying again. I was the one doing all of the work. I was their "go-to guy." I was the sucker. I spent years picking up the slack for everyone else and had nothing to show for it. I wasn't the only one, either. That is the lesson to be learned here.



It was their birthright, and it was luck. They were born to families who could afford to jump them through all the hoops of pretentiousness. They are the friends are relatives of the people who mattered. They sure as hell weren't people who actually worked for Wal-Mart.



My point is, working harder and being optimistic and otherwise doing more to help them is not helping yourself. What we represent is something that is completely disposable to them. They don't need to recognize your work because they don't have to. They don't need to pay more because they don't have to. You are absolutely right when you say the work isn't worth a higher wage, because it isn't worth anything at all. If the minimum wage suddenly disappeared right now, they'd be able to thumb through applications and find people who would practically be volunteers, you know, people like you with that "can do" attitude who'd be willing to start at $0.10 an hour and "work their way up" to $0.17 after thirty or so years.



...and there lies my key point. These people aren't "better than me." Not even fucking close. I have talked to them about how they got to be where they are actually. Many of them, (but not all!), are lazy, stupid, and completely worthless people. Go and work for Wal-Mart if you love being forced to take orders from people who are smaller, weaker and dumber than you. Most of the stores I worked for barely made it by because of how utterly incompetent the people running it were. There was nothing the rest of us could do about it but laugh at their stupidity between desperately looking for a way out.

Edited, Dec 19th 2015 6:48pm by Kuwoobie

Armed extremists take federal building. Fox News cheers. Same ole same ole.

They aren't terrorists. Terrorists are a fairly specific thing; they mount attacks in order to inspire terror among civilian populations in order to raise awareness for their cause.

They are, however, rebels; more specifically particularist rebels.

I keep thinking how different the response would be if they were Muslim-Americans, or African-Americans, or Mexican-Americans, or pretty much anything besides white trash entitled rancher Americans.

There might be exacerbating elements who railroad them towards violence, but I'm not sure that is true. BLM/occupy have taken up residence in public buildings, and made it out more or less intact. Mexican Americans are generally more concerned with not being on police radar to occupy federal property, but they have peacefully protested things like Trump rallies.

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies this as antigovernment extremism, and tracks it back 20 years or so (I'd put it farther back than that, personally - see Sagebrush Rebellion). No surprise, they tend to rear their terrified little heads during Democratic Presidencies.

They SAY they want less Federal interference. What they MEAN is that they want to clear cut, mine, overgraze and generally ruin land that the government has set aside as wilderness areas.

It's the FBI's definition, and I personally wouldn't consider yelling dangerous to human life, or really violating any actual laws.

I don't think it's terrorism. I do think it's treason. Or maybe sedition; I've never been clear on what constitutes sedition, exactly.