Most Wal-Mart greeters are extremely old people dressed in a bright company shirt who wave a hand and smile and welcome you to Wal-Mart.
It’s a job that could be done with a sign or a robot, but the old people turn out to be cheaper.
Especially if you only hire them for a few weeks as a “greeter contractor” so you don’t have to pay them health benefits.
Sure, it’s rather scummy, using them up and tossing them aside, but in Wal-Mart’s defense, it does get boring seeing the same old old person there at the door, greeting me.
Tag: work
Shiver
I go down to the vault, turn off the lights, close my eyes, and meditate.
The robotic forklifts use magnetic guides on the floors and on the shelves, so they don’t need light.
Nor do they need to beep when the lights are off. If there was a person down here to warn, the lights would be on.
Their motors and lifting forks sound strange in the dark, shifting crates from the loading dock to the shelves, and then from the shelves to the showroom conveyors.
We keep it cold down here.
I shiver until I have achieved total peace.
Artists
We name our office printers after artists.
Matisse was very slow and you can see the dots in the rendering.
Pollock was just downright messy, leaking ink all over the place.
Van Gogh would cut off every so often.
Warhol never got many print jobs, but it served as an excellent copier.
Renoir’s colors were far too bright, and it cost us a fortune.
Breughel and Bosch were a nightmare to set up and keep running.
And the less said about Mapplethorpe, the better, okay?
In the end, we gave up and sent all of our print jobs to Kinko’s.
Pitchman
The drill sergeant shouted that he wanted the floors so clean, he could eat off of them.
So, we invented a brush and solvent that cleaned the floors perfectly.
We came back two weeks later to clean the floors… and were promptly arrested by MPs.
We were charged with going AWOL.
“But we did what the sergeant told us to do,” I said. “R&D ain’t instant. Heck, that stuff can clean just about anything.”
We were dishonorably discharged from the Army, but made a fortune with the brushes and solvent.
Heck, the sergeant is our pitchman in the informercials now.
Silence of the staplers
I sat down at my desk and looked for my stapler.
“It’s gone,” I said. “Who took my stapler?”
My boss leaned over the cubicle wall. “I did. I took all of them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Paper’s expensive, and paperwork sucks. So if anything you do takes over a printed page to explain, you’re fired.”
He smiled and went to get more coffee.
At first, people just used smaller fonts, but the boss banned magnifying lenses, too.
Pretty soon, we used less paper and became more efficient and profitable.
A Chinese company undercut our prices and we went bankrupt anyway.
Cyber Monday
It’s Cyber Monday, and here at the server farm, we like to turn the lights off and watch the twinkling network switches flowing commerce through the datacenter.
It’s a beautiful thing when an online store gets their servers, databases, and load-balancers and firewalls tested and ready in time for the shopping rush.
And then there’s the others… the ones we told last year that they needed more memory or more processor power or a load-balancer.
Instead, they ignored our advice, and opted to go for more bitching instead.
Help! They’re losing business!
Good. Fuck the sonsabitches.
Penny unwise, thousands foolish.
Potluck
It’s the holidays, but when you’re “essential staff” where I work, you don’t get those off.
Instead, you’re required to burn a paid day off or come in, which sucks, even when you get double pittance (oops, I mean double pay) for doing so.
So, we have potluck lunches, and everybody’s supposed to bring in a dish.
Nobody signed up, though, so the night before, management announced that participation was now mandatory.
Whatever, grumbled the team.
The next day, the break room was stacked high with the twenty last-minute tubs of potato salad they’d bought.
Who wants to order pizza?
Humpty Pepsi
The sodas in the break room machines are free.
If you select the wrong one, you’re supposed to put it on the table for someone else to take.
Nobody ever does, though. They’re warm by then.
So, I took a diet Pepsi and put it on my cubicle divider.
I named it Humpty Pepsi.
After five months, a coworker’s elbow hit it, and it fell on the floor, spraying him and all of his stuff.
He was not amused.
I wasn’t either, because all of my horses and all of my men will never put Humpty Pepsi back together again.
Stick To The Point
Our meetings used to go on far too long and never accomplished anything. People would get off the point too easily, or get mired in conflicting agendas.
So, we hired a barbarian from the steppes of Turkey to manage discussions.
Ugdur doesn’t even need to reach for his flail anymore, let alone whallop anyone with it.
Just by raising his eyebrow, we put down our Blackberries, reach consensus quickly, and get back to work.
Sadly, we had to fire Ugdur.
Caught stealing office supplies, and he attacked the receptionist.
If you’re going to pillage and plunder, stick to the shareholders.
Job Market
The job market out there is tough, and everybody’s beefing up their resume with exaggerations and lies.
Me, I’m beefing up my resume with beef.
I started by sending my resume with the finest steaks packed in a cooler with dry ice.
The recruiter threw out the resume and ate the steaks.
Then, I developed a special dye to etch my resume on to the steaks.
The writing vanished as the steaks cooked.
Finally, I made sheets of jerky and printed the resume on those.
By then, the recruiter had died of a heart attack.
And I got his job.