Waliland: Land of the Free Range Ameritard

So I've been finding that working at WalMart is a lot more taxing on my patience than I ever would have thought.

I'm getting up there in years, and for every year that goes by I get a little more grouchy and intolerant of other people. You all know this. So working around the army of douchebags we call "customers" is going to make me crazy in short order.

First of all, there are the clueless ones. These are the people who can see that you are pulling a pallet behind you that weighs two-thousand pounds and has some real momentum behind it, and yet, they decide that they suddenly need to stop dead in your path. I mean, it's not as if the pallet was freakin' invisible. It's five and a half feet tall and four feet across and moving rapidly, and yet when they see that I'm bearing down on them at breakneck speed with a move-it-or-lose-it predatory grin on my face, they just stop right in front of me with the same slack-jawed, drooling expression usually seen on cows chewing on alfalfa in pastures.

You would think that a reasonable person would step out of the way and drag their ill mannered little slack-jawed clones with them, but you would be wrong.

Instead they stare; not at me, but through me. Like me and my burden aren't even there. I'm not hard to miss either. I'm nearly three feet across at the shoulders and wearing a bright yellow-green reflective vest! Hello, Earth to Clueless, move your about to be Darwin-Awarded butt!

Then, in a state of panic, I have to spin the handle on my pallet jack to slow it down and throw my weight against it to get it to stop before a lawsuit happens. I briefly try to teach them manners by hitting them with my best accusatory, reproachful glare, but they ignore me, turning their stupid heads away like those aforementioned slack-jawed cattle and slowly, oh so slowly move on, leaving me fuming and suppressing the urge to walk up behind them and punch 'em in the back of the head just for fun.

I swear, if I've ever done this kind of crap to some other poor Walmart guy in the past, I apologize a thousand times.

And second. The damned kids. Why oh why can't parents keep their little monsterous creatures under control? There's work being done here, people! If you have kids that will not behave, don't take them to Walmart after 9:00 PM. That's when the heavy gear comes out and they could get run over.

I almost ran over a kid yesterday that ran full tilt out of an isle without looking, just as I had a full pallet of dog food going full speed. I almost put my back out getting it stopped before I hit him.

And tonight; no joke, I was heading into the garden area with a full pallet of weed killer, when I see two kids, a girl and boy, jumping around on a pallet of bags, standing at least three feet off the floor. That's a major safety hazard. I don't care who you are, you don't let your kids play on pallets that are on concrete. If they fall, what's left of their brains is gonna be leaking out all over the place and I'm not cleaning it up.

So, there they were playing on a pallet of bags, when a guy that I can only describe as "watery-looking" walked up to me. Seriously, he looked watery, like he was just moist. It was weird.

So he walks up to me and says, not kidding at all, "I need you to go yell at them to get off that stuff. They won't listen to me or do what I tell them."

I stood there for a heartbeat looking at this guy's watery eyes and reddish nose. I wanted to tell him to sack up and be the dad, but that wouldn't be very good customer service, so I walked up to the kids and before I could open my mouth, I noticed what the bags were that they were sprawled all over, and my inner demon cackled in glee.

"Hey kids. You don't have to get off that if you don't want to, but you know what's in those bags right?"

"What?" The girl said it in a snotty tone and cocked her head and gave me this defiant little sneer that made me want to yell at her and cuff her upside the head. No wonder that poor guy was so at wits' end. Little bastards.

"It's poo. You're layin' in poo. Get off that stuff. Go look at the fish." I pointed down the isle where the fish are located.

"Eeew." The kids were grossed out and got off the pallet and walked away. I can't understand how they managed to have missed the smell of that crap. Bagged fertilizer still smells destinctively of poo.

Some people's kids. I'm betting that the guy was their two-weekend a month custody dad who gets to barely survive keeping his kids in line after they've spent the last two weeks being undisciplined and ignored by their mom and her thug boyfriend. At least, that was my impression, but what do I know?

So, just some brief scenes of delight from the Supercenter we love so much.

I'm gonna go stretch my back and take a hot shower and likely bathe my feet in Epsom salt, and then afterwards slap myself silly for writing such an old-man sentence as this.

Good day.