Stewart, who worked alongside of me in the electronics department, was a scrawny man with clammy skin, a raspy voice, a curly bleach blond mullet, and a proclivity to applying entirely too much brut cologne.  He had aspirations of becoming a Professional Wrestler, and even went so far as to enrol and graduate from a wrestling school and have a custom made spandex uniform designed to match his chosen wrestling personality.

Sally was a precious 72 year old woman who transferred into my department from the office supplies department because the hours suited her better.  Several years prior she had survived a severe heart attack, so her mobility was limited.  In addition, she was deaf in one ear and her eyesight was failing her.  To further complicate things, even though she worked in the electronics department, electronics to her might as well have been applied quantum mechanics.  She was content spending the evening working the cash register and tidying up the shelves or alphabetizing the CDs, and leaving Stewart and myself to bitterly field the 400-900 customer questions each night.

Roger, a.k.a. “Rog,” was a short, chubby guy in his late twenties who worked with us part-time in the evenings and had a second job installing state-of-the-art car stereo systems at his friend’s garage.  He was absolutely worthless.  If he wasn’t talking on his cell phone, he was in another department flirting with the cashiers, or nowhere to be found; but he was so funny, and made so many stupid comments that we kept him around for comedic relief and to make the time pass by more quickly.  One Friday night as Stewart and I were making our way back into the store from having just helped Another Satisfied Customer load their newly purchased television into the back of his pick-up truck, Roger’s car pulled up in front of us, but it wasn’t Roger behind the wheel, it was an angry woman with three young children dangerously un-seat belted in the back seat.

“Excuuuuuuse me.” She demanded as she manually rolled the passenger window down, “Is Roger working tonight?”

“Roger? Working?” I responded in a joking manner, “He never works on Friday nights.”

“MmmmmmmHmmmmmm.” She responded as if she already knew the answer to the question. “That’s what I thought.”

With that she threw the car into drive and peeled off, leaving tire marks in front of us, and the three children bouncing around in the back seat.  Stewart gasped and stared at me in horror.

“You idiot!  Do you know what you just did?” He asked me. “Roger told his wife he works Friday nights so he can see his other girlfriends.”

“Well, I guess that means he is in trouble now, huh?” I responded as I laughed my way back into the store. “That’s what he gets.”

Three hours later Roger’s wife found him standing in the McDonalds parking lot across the street talking on his cell phone.  She first tried to run him over with his own car, and when that failed she threw the car into park, and attacked him with a kitchen knife.  While he managed to get away unscathed, there was no sign of him for an entire week, probably from laying low to avoid his wife, and ultimately our manager had to fire him due to so many unexcused absences.

Jonny, our department manager, was a passive and unnecessarily energetic middle-aged man. His mother was from Tennessee, his father Alabama, and so his accent was a fascinating melange.  One Saturday night around 1:30 in the morning, he was awoken by a phone call.  It was a customer wanting to know if the 19 inch televisions were going to be on sale the upcoming week.  The following Monday morning he came in to work furious.  Apparently Sally had given the customer Jonny’s full name, and the customer looked his home phone number up in the yellow pages.

Willy, who looked like a cheap prototype of Eminem, was hired to replace “Rog” and to help during the Christmas season.  He would have had a permanent job with the company after the holidays if he hadn’t been so hostile.  But then again, three years in prison for aggravated manslaughter would do that to a man.  The toy section was located directly in front of the electronics department.  Willy loathed children.  Mothers, eager to enjoy a break from their undomesticated children, would drop them off in the toy department as if it were a super-daycare center.  At any given time, 15-45 kids ran or rode bicycles unhindered throughout the eight aisles of toy heaven.  However, it was only a matter of time before the flashing lights and sounds emanating from the electronics department lured them over, where they would take turns testing the limits of the speakers on the stereo systems on display or fighting over whose turn it was to play the PS2 or the newly released X-box.

By his third day of work, Willy had had enough.  I returned from my lunch break to find the department silent and lifeless, and Willy propped against the register thumbing through a gun magazine with a smug look on his face.  Lying beside him was a pair of wire clippers that he had confiscated from the hardware department, and in the trashcan underneath the register were the cords to every single appliance on display in the department.

Jonny was furious, but he was so docile and frightened by the ex-convict, that he never confronted him.  Instead the 43 stereo systems and alarm clocks on display were removed and written off as damaged merchandise, new models were installed, and by the following Monday morning the department was back to working order.  Once the Christmas season was over, Willy was let go.

Finally, there was Marge, the overnight stocker.  Marge was so pessimistic, and complained so much, that you couldn’t help but intentionally do things wrong just to see how far you could provoke her.  She absolutely loathed her job, yet she had been doing it for over sixteen years.  Every night, Marge would make me follow her up and down the aisles of the department like a four year old child, using the handle of her broom to point out spots on the shelves that needed to be fixed before we could go home.  She was a nightly reminder to me as to why I was in university – to get a better job.  My biggest fear was that I would end up like her- stagnate, celebrating the seventeenth year anniversary at a job she hated, and working for a company she despised.

True Story.