Three Witch Hunts (and its not even Halloweenie yet!)

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been reports of two “witch hunts” in the news.  One of them is legitimate, the other not so much.  A third witch hunt is how mine from Staples can be sandwiched between the two.

First Up:  Julian Assange

Poor Julian.  He claims a “witch hunt” is after him by the United States for his postings on Wikileaks.  Gee, if you write things to a website that could jeopardize national security, doesn’t that make you a criminal?  Apparently , NOT according to Julian himself.  To make matters worse, some credit card companies cut off his accounts and his group of hoodlums went and attacked the credit card companies websites.  Now he blames the U.S. for being on a witch hunt against him.  Sadly, the U.S. government won’t hunt this guy down from where he is hiding and drag him back to the United States and put him on trial once and for all.  He is a criminal and should be treated as such.

Similarly, Staples decided to become a hacker into its attacks against me and attempted to get into my Hotmail account, my MySpace account, and my Facebook account.  I found out that they did it by the fact that all 3 gave me warnings that they were tampered with and who better to hack into them at the time than that evil company of Staples.

Secondly:  Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong and I share a lot more in common than most people would ever realize.  However, I can’t ride a bike nor would I ever try.  Yet we both have seen our lives destroyed by the stupidity of others and thus lost everything in the process.  Amongst the similarities  are:

• We both were accused of things that were not true by others.  He by the idea that he was doping on hi Tour de France rides and me by having Staples lie about my employment record with the company.
• We both had friends/teammates turn against us.  Never trust somebody who you think is your friend because chances are they really are not and they will turn against you when you turn your back.  Staples even went a step further and had people comment about me who never met me and had no prior experience with me whatsoever. 
• We both went before quasi-government agencies with bad results.  He went before the Anti-Doping Agency and I went before the Maine Human Rights Commission.  Similarly, each of us were condemned for our actions even though in both cases there was no proof to back up the cases.  You can’t win against ignorant people.
• We both gave up on our causes and decided not to go on fighting.  Sadly, you can’t win against liars or stupid people who don’t even look at the evidence.  I will explain my case much more thoroughly in future posts, but for now all I will say is that I exhausted my entire appeal process with less than desirable results. 
• We both had health issues.  Yes, Lance is a cancer survivor and my surviving had to do with the fact that I could have lost my leg (or legs) if it wasn’t for the irresponsibility of Staples by not heeding my warning of a potential hazard a couple years beforehand.  Staples was so aggressive in their fight against my health claim that they threatened to terminate me in both in-store meetings and a letter that was sent to my home.  I will have more to say about that in the future.

So are the witch hunts justified? 

Julian Assange – Definitely, as this guy is nothing but a criminal whose only desire is to create problems for the U.S. government.

Lance Armstrong – Not by a long shot.  Stripped of his Tour de France wins just adds to everything else this guy has to deal with.  Dealing with former teammates who lie and with no evidence, its hard to prove oneself easily.  It’s obvious he could never win against the government agency that refuses to realize that no evidence of drugs was ever found in his tests.  Sadly, the truth is ignored and he is the biggest losers.  Thankfully many of his sponsors has stood up and continued to support him along with his endorsements.

Louis Brown – Depending who you want to believe, I am either a good employee who got screwed or a bad employee, which Staples wanted to get rid of no matter what.  Sadly, the MHRC didn’t look at the evidence and like Lance had the word of others mean more than the real truth.  Even though I no longer have a case against them, I feel justified that this ongoing blog will spark the attention of those who are important and realize how bad Staples really is.

Last Minute Political Note

Apparently, Tom Stemberg (founder of Staples) will be one of the speakers at the Republican Convention tonight (8/30/2012) throwing his support to Mitt Romney as U.S, President.  If the American people are smart, which most are not, they would see through this feeble attempt at making Romney look like a job creator.  In reality, he is more of a life destroyer.  Please join me in defeating Mitt this fall and keep the Wall Street cronies from getting richer.  Don’t be fooled by Romney’s false front.  Thank you for your ongoing support.

 

 

Best Buy Slump

As was expected, Best Buy’s quarterly sales slumped a whopping 91% from the previous quarter.  To add insult to injury, the company has decided to no longer issue forecasts in the future.  This really sounds like a double whammy as to the future of the company.  I expect eventually Staples will do a similar thing as their sales have slipped significantly in the last couple of quarters.

I believe it is now a race to see which company will go out of business first.  However, lets not count out companies like JCPenney, RadioShack, Barnes and Noble, Office Max, and Office Depot to lead the way to bankruptcy.  It will be an interesting rest of 2012 to watch what happens.

Best Buy Gets New CEO

Best Buy has itself a new CEO in Hubert Joly, formerly of Carlson Hotel chain.  On the news of this, the stock has dropped over 10% on the news.  Tomorrow the company reports its quarterly earnings which may send the stock plunging even further sending it into the bargain basement level of fellow stock of Staples. 

I still stand firm on my belief that Best Buy is on its last legs and possibly be out of business by the end of this year or middle of next year.  I also believe that Staples is heading in that same direction and may be out of business itself by end of 2013.  Both of these companies deserve to disappear and be only time before it actually happens. 

I will keep you all updated on the continuing downfall of Best Buy and the inevitable downfall of Staples.  Stay tuned friends!

Thug Politics

It seems as though all the politicians are acting like they have a stick up their butts.  Just today, Maine Governor Paul LePage wants to call a special session of legislature to possibly do something that nobody in the state will love.  This is on top of other thug statements made in the last week or so.

Examples include:

• Vice President Joe Biden calling that citizens will be “in chains” if Romney is elected President.
• Super PAC for Obama which airs an ad for a man whose wife had died because he lost his job and thus his health insurance because Romney shut down his company.

Both of these examples represent the type of extreme lengths that the Democrats will go to retain the White House.  However, I believe in both of these cases, there is more truth than falsehoods in the statements as has been reported by media outlets.

The reason I believe this is that big business and Wall Street have controlled the way politics are run without any consideration of the general public.  If these groups considered the general public, they would not be spending millions of dollars to defeat each other’s candidate.  These people would be spending their money on hiring workers and not wasting it on political campaigns.  But then again, individuals mean nothing to corporations.  Just ask any unemployed person like myself and they too would blame people like Romney for their unemployment. 

Even though both sides could be blamed for being thugs in these turbulent times, it is the general public who will have to decide which thug better agrees with their own beliefs.  May the lesser thug win!

Took Time Off

Last week, I decided to unplug from the internet.  I stayed away from email, Twitter, and most importantly Facebook.  Unfortunately, that also meant that I also stayed away from writing to this blog.  I felt that I needed the summer “vacation” just to unravel and get away from the connected world and feel the real world for a while.  Of course this meant that I have a lot to catch up on, but that is the chance I took.  Hopefully, I will be resuming this blog either tomorrow or early next week, as the weather starts to cool down a little.  So until then enjoy my apology and this posting.

The Other Woolworth Positions

Besides working the customer service desk, cashier, and front-end supervisor, I also held other positions in the store as well.  Some were one-time shots, others more often.  Listed below in order of appearances are those other positions and comments about them:

Restaurant Cashier 

There is nothing more awful to look at then watching people eat.  Try this experiment if you don’t believe me:  put a mirror in front of you and start eating.  If you are not freaked out within a couple of minutes, then congratulations, otherwise welcome to my personal hell.  Even though this was a sitting position, it had a lot of downtime.  Most employees read between ringing up customers and it was quite obvious why.  I just sat there staring at the smoke-filled room, waiting for the next customer to come to the counter with their bill to be rung up.  This brings up another point:  many of the bills were added wrong.  So I had to account for these errors and ring their bill up as listed on their check.  No wonder this register was always short.  Nobody ever knew how to ring up over in the restaurant.  It would not be for a couple of years when smoking was banned in the mall and smoking in the restaurant was eliminated.  This was an eventual state law, but too late for the couple times I worked in the restaurant.  Certainly not worth the 50% discount for restaurant employees, which I was for about a week.  Probably the worst place in the store to work short of the pet department, which I never worked.

Women’s Department

It wasn’t often that a guy would work in the women’s clothing section.  This section also included the baby section as well.  Spending a night or afternoon in this section might interest some people, but the thought of endlessly straightening women’s clothing on racks was more than just dull – it was super dull.  Besides that, dealing with the fitting room was almost an endless task as well as this was a babysitting job just to make sure that nobody ever stole anything.  I would also note that this position also required endlessly straightening up the shoe department.  As anybody who has ever looked at any store’s shoe section, this could be an endless task by itself.  I am so glad that I was only in this department a couple of times, just because the store was very desperate.

Men’s Department

Across from the woman’s section was my other hated section: the men’s department.  It was easier to relate to this section because I was a guy, but it still was not the fun section either.  Most importantly this section was small and had just one fitting room unlike the woman’s section that had 4 fitting rooms.  The worst thing about this department was the straightening of the Dickies clothes.  Anybody who has ever handled these clothes know how heavy they can be especially the full suits.  What made this department so bad was that it was a very claustrophobic space.  It was a great relief when I finally got to leave this department for even for a few minutes.

Jewelry Department

Speaking of tight spaces, nothing was any tighter than the jewelry register area. The space between a wall and a counter was about 3 feet wide, which made it a pretty tight squeeze to enter the register area. The rest of the department wasn’t much better either. It was not uncommon to bump into one counter while trying to maneuver around another. In doing so, it was very easy to knock the jewelry onto the floor, which I did frequently. This was another one of those thankful departments that I rarely appeared in only when the store was desperate.

Domestics Department

This one should almost be disqualified as this area was part of my customer service desk duties as well. During my downtime (read: when I felt like it), I was supposed to straighten up the curtain and bedding section, which was 5 aisles wide to the right of the customer service area and the area of the sewing section which was about 4 aisles straight forward of the customer service desk. I usually wandered into these sections just for the exercise alone, but the straightening was sometimes very frustrating. Curtains were especially troublesome as it was difficult to sometimes figure out which package each open package piece belonged to. I know many times I probably screwed this up, but what do you expect from somebody who knows nothing about curtains.  The sewing area was hardly any better as keeping the different types of yarn in the right bins was sometimes an endless battle of emptying the bins and resorting the yarns out by type.  No matter what neither section of domestics were enjoyable, thus I tried hard not to spend a lot of time in either section.

Sporting Goods Department

Yee-Hah!  Nothing more satisfying to a gun-toting cowboy than working in this section.  This section, which was nestled between the Stationary department, the toy department, and the housewares department, was probably the most depressing department to work in.  As I knew nothing about rifles, camping, or bicycles, this section was not a favorite of mine.  Since this department wasn’t visited much, not much ever needed straightening.  So this department was nothing more than walking around being bored.  The worst thing about this department was the handling of the rifles.  The smell of the gun oil made me sick and getting it on my hands was even worse.  I eventually figured a way to handle the guns by wrapping my hands in paper towels to handle them.  Yea, it looked stupid but it worked for me.  Worse than handling the rifles was the paperwork needed to sell one.  Thankfully, a form needed to be faxed to Augusta to perform a background check before any rifle could be sold.  This took about 5 days and it did anger some people.  I guess the satisfaction of having a rifle today was not in some people’s plans.  I usually got stuck working in this department on Saturday nights when one of the two regular associates were off.  Never looked forward to those nights at all.

Music Department

Finally, the one department that I spent the most time in by far was this one.  It was also the department I also enjoyed the most as well.  I mean who would not enjoy being surrounded by videos, cds, boom boxes, and video game systems.  This was my playground of fun.  When nobody was around, I would go over to the Sega Genesis machine and play Sonic the Hedgehog.  I was never any good at it, but I enjoyed it just the same.  We also had a Nintendo kiosk, but was not set up to actually play games – it just looped a demo on a laser-disc player contained within the display.  When we stopped carrying video games, I purchased that laser-disc player and got the Nintendo demo disc left inside as a bonus.  I think I have quite a collectable despite laser-disc players no longer being manufactured.

Another fun part of the department was watching VHS tapes, listening to the radio, and playing cds.  The important thing about cds was that I was working there when the transition was made from the long extended cardboard boxes that the cds were in and were left in their smaller cd jewel cases.  Thank the tree-huggers for that one.  To protect the cds, a new security package was introduced that housed the cd that needed to be opened with a special key.  A similar package was also used on cassette tapes as well as their cardboard packages were also eliminated as well.  I will have more to say about product security in future posts.  One thing I proved about cds while working there was that it was absolutely possible to play a cd to death, did that twice with the same title.  The cd, which was a department favorite, was Weird Al Yankovic’s “Jurassic Park”.  A very enjoyable cd for those who love parodies and all his work is always entertaining.

However, not everything was fun and games in the department.  I spent a lot of my time endlessly pricing things that were brought over to me.  My hands were sore after a long day of pricing merchandise.  More will be said about pricing merchandise in a future post as well. 

The funniest thing that ever happened in that department was when a bird got loose in the pet department and decided to fly over to the music department to do a little looking around.  The little bird sat upon a video tape rack and one by one knocked each video tape to the floor while standing on the one next to it.  When the bird got to the last tape, the bird jumped to the shelf and pushed the last one onto the floor.  This bird was easily caught because it just wanted to sit on this rack with nothing else on it.  It certainly wasn’t the first time that a bird got loose and certainly wouldn’t be the last either. 

Conclusion:

Overall everyday at Woolworth brought variety.  Hardly a day was ever dull as there was always something to do or maybe just a little time for some fun.  But you can’t have fun if you don’t carry merchandise and with that will be the next topic as I discuss the regular merchandise carried along with the more odd stuff carried.

Up Next:  Oh the Merchandise We Carried!