What’s this? I’m trying to blog once a day for 50 days! Inspired by Forking Mad and Lou Plummer.

What is your all-time favorite story to tell from all the jobs you’ve held?

While I do have software engineer stories, I’m not great at telling them, and they are also not very interesting. Therefore, my best stories come from my summer at Walmart. In 2013, I was hired as a seasonal associate for the Lawn & Garden section of the store (my first “"”real””” job). If you’re familiar with Walmart, this is where they have things like lawn chairs, lawnmowers, weed whackers, shovels, dirt, flowers… etc. This section is busiest in the summer, naturally, which is why they hire seasonal people like me.

This is, in fact, where I got my first weird customer of the season. One day, a woman came in with one of those hanging planters with flowers in it. She told me she’d like to return them, because they died. I asked her, how long did you have them? Not long. Did you water them? Not really, she said, but it had rained. The entire interaction was very confusing, and I didn’t know how returns worked, so I just directed her to the front of the store.

Sometime around July, the store transitions to its “back to school” season and the front of the store is filled with school supplies. For administrative reasons I don’t understand and probably aren’t important, I was also transitioned to back to school when that opened up. However, in practice, anyone from any part of the store can be pulled into (almost) any other part of the store if there is a need. As I would soon find out…

Between the notebooks and the lawn and garden section, which I occasionally still needed to cover, there was an aisle or two of pet supplies. For those unfamiliar, Walmarts also sometimes sell live animals - often just fish, like ours did. Due to my proximity, I was quickly trained on the pet section in case I needed to cover it in a pinch. While walking between my two main sections, I did indeed receive my first interaction with a customer in the pet section. An annoyed-looking woman was walking around, holding a bag of two dead goldfish. “They died!” she said, “I want to return them!” Keep in mind, to my memory at the time, goldfish cost under a dollar each, and this woman had maybe two of them. I directed her to the returns counter and as far as I know, she was indeed refunded.

All of this leads up to my worst best story (you decide which.) Walmart really did not like its employees doing overtime unless absolutely necessary - but if you did do it, you had to clock it. I was happy never doing overtime, but one night, I was scheduled to end at 10:00 PM, and a customer approached me at about 9:30 PM wanting some Koi from the fish tanks. I don’t remember what she wanted them for, but she wanted about 10 of them. This was one of my first times trying to get fish for a customer and of course she wanted a lot. It took me a long time to even get a single Koi in the pitifully small net. I am ashamed to say I probably did some damage to those poor fish, trying to get them out of the tank, all while this woman was breathing down my neck with her kids running around the store. I was on the employee radio, trying to get some other help, or a manager, but everyone was unavailable or on break. It took me a long time and this woman did not want to give up waiting. Clearly Walmart’s top Fish Wrangler was on the case at 10pm on some random weekday - they wouldn’t just send a teenager and a tiny, bendy net to do such an important job, right? A teenager that doesn’t even work in that section?

After that ordeal, tense as I’ve ever been, I clocked out (about 20 minutes after my shift end, thus overtime) and drove home where my mom was up watching TV. As I recounted the events of the day to her, I started laughing… and laughing… and laughing… I just couldn’t stop - literally, I just couldn’t stop, and nothing was particularly funny. Freaking goldfish drove me to a literal mental break.

I am not cut out for stressful situations and I try very hard to ensure I am not in that position at work - some people are cut out for it, and some are not.

Towards the end of the summer, I was walking to the back of the store when I was stopped by someone in the childrens’ clothing section. She demanded that I take a look at an obscene article of clothing and wanted to know how we could sell anything like that??? Here it is:

skylanders pajamas where a robot's open hand is divided by the crotch seam, making the robot thumb vaguely phallic

Do you see it? The robot’s hand is outstretched, but the four fingers were cut off by the seam in the middle, leaving only the thumb. The lady thought the thumb and its placement were… suggestive. Once she explained this to me, in huffy tones, I couldn’t help but be amused. I told her I’d let the person who stocked the clothing section know. I’m sure what she actually wanted was for me to take it right to the top, to the Waltons, or the Skylanders President, or whoever was corrupting the minds of the youth. But I walked away and never heard anything come of it. That said, when was the last time you heard about Skylanders?

I don’t miss working at Walmart but it is one of those things that I tell people about a lot even today. In tech, I’ve seen a lot of people get their first actual jobs right out of college, and they come into this corporate setting of offices, whiteboards, computers, and salaries. Walmart undoubtedly shaped me (even in just two summers) - for the better! - because I know the importance of maintaining a wall of separation between work and home. To new grads who come directly from school, I’ve seen first hand that they sometimes think they have to always be working since that’s how they did their university coursework (or maybe that was just me.) No way, man! There’s a clock, and at 5:00pm, I am off of it. So be nice to retail employees, people, and be quick to forgive them when they don’t know the answer to your questions, or can’t fully address them.