Vacation Time

Today begins my twelve-day vacation from Wal-Mart, giving me time to get my other projects going and, more importantly, rest up from the holiday season. I’m sure it's logical to you, but working retail is a bitch during the Christmas shopping season. This is when we get to rest: everyone else has already had their holiday and is grudgingly getting back to work. But now, we get a chance to calm down and celebrate.

I do enjoy my work—it’s not my dream job, but I do find pleasurable parts to get me through the days—but sometimes, the job itself kinda stinks. Good customers honestly make the job worth it; bad customers make me wonder why I ever applied in the first place. Or better put, the bad customers make me pretty worried about the direction basic civility is headed.

For example, I respect customers who actually take the time to look for their own damn products instead of bothering the nearest employee about it, but that’s what we’re there for, and I don’t exactly mind when a customer requests directions. However, the key word there is “request.” I had a guy several months ago just come up to me and shout “Light bulbs!” in a grizzled, military veteran voice. I pointed him in the direction of Hardware and gave him directions to the specific aisle, and he just did a reverse Bruce Willis Turn and sulked away in the direction I indicated. No thank you, nothing else.

It’s not a one-time occurrence. During Christmas, I had a woman come up to me and ask, “Can I ask you a question?” I said she could, so she goes: “Ant traps!” That’s not a question; that’s a compound noun. At that point, I should be able to start screaming random nouns too, like “Carpet!” or “Enema lube!”

Actually, “enema lube” is fitting, since if I’ve got a customer yelling product names at me, I’m more than likely talking to an asshole.

Read the rest of Pyro's WWE recap at Online Onslaught!