My Mom was not going to be content to allow me to goof off during my final summer before college. She more or less coerced me to get a job at Kmart. Since several of her DECA students worked there, she was very familiar with the woman in charge of hiring and was able to talk her into giving me a position. I saw this as nothing but a waste of time and money because I was probably just going to use my earnings to play video games anyway.
This was one of the strangest jobs I ever had because I didn't really just work one area. At first, I was supposed to work in the stockroom, which would have meant that I didn't need to wear a dress shirt or a tie. My first day, I showed up wearing my only dress shirt, but no tie. A manager told me I needed to wear a tie. He said he normally would have sent me home, but since it was my first day, he wasn't going to do that. I had to go buy a tie and some more dress shirts. Unfortunately, I had to go to Mr. E's to do that.
So I basically floated around the various departments doing just about whatever they asked me to do. If I finished a project, I had to go ask what I was supposed to do next. If there wasn't anything to do, I had to clean. However, I found that I could go back into the stockroom and just sit there unnoticed for several minutes at a time. Since it was very quiet back there, if I heard anyone walking around, I could quickly make it look like I was doind something I was supposed to do.
Since I was only going to be working there for six weeks before going to college, I never got trained as a cashier. That was a position you had to work up to. (Many years later, I would work at Walmart. I started as a cashier. However, checkout scanners were not common store equipment back in 1982.)
I got asked to do some odd stuff, like assemble lawn mowers. I guess we had some customers who were too lazy to put the mowers together themselves, so they had us do it. I was never quite certain that I had put the mowers together properly. I can only imagine a few people got their toes chopped off and it was all my fault. (And this was before the United States went lawsuit crazy.)
One thing I had to do was do the new layout for the lightbulb aisle. The manager showed me a piece of paper with where all the different types of bulbs and to go and he told me it needed to look just like the picture on the paper. Very soon, I discovered that our shelf was several inches shorter than the shelf on the paper. I had to improvise and make the sections slightly shorter. The manager still got mad at me because it didn't look like it did on the instructions.
One of the strangest things I was asked to do was demolish a lamp. The manager told me it was obsolete. My first thought was, "How can a lamp be obsolete?" I mean, it's a lamp. You just turn it on and turn it off. To this day, we still have lamps and they're pretty much the same as they were in 1982. Now, I would have understood if they were recalled due to loose wiring and people getting shocked to death, but that wasn't what I was told. I put the lamp in a cardboard box and struck it several times with a sledgehammer. I didn't see anything wrong with it.
One of the things I wound up getting stuck with doing on a regular basis was watering all the plants. I had to do this the last three weeks before I went to college. I got this bug sprayer, filled it with water and squirted it on all the plants. There was no actual garden center at the store. All the plants were just on one of the regular aisles. This meant there was no drainage for the excess water, so I also had to mop the floor afterward. This whole process took up half my work day.
One of the nice things about working at Kmart at the time is that you got paid every week in cash. That was so nice that I didn't have to worry about having to take a check to the bank. I just showed up at the accounting office window, picked up my pay and left. I would never have another job that paid this way ever again.
I actually came back to work at Kmart during the Christmas break. I remember walking in to see the hiring lady, whose office was inside the breakroom. When I left, I could hear one of the other employees saying, "Oh, no! He's not coming back here to work, is he?" Yes, that made me feel wanted. They actually needed me because all the students were about to go back to school and classes at ENMU wouldn't start for another week and a half. I got to work for two weeks. That just wound up being more money for pizza and video games.
Many years later in 2001, I got laid off from a really good job in San Diego prior to the holiday shopping season. When I tried calling unemployment to make a claim, the recording suggested that I wait until January 1st to file since benefits were going to go up then. I decided to get a seasonal job. There was a Kmart just down the street from where I lived. I figured that since I had worked for Kmart before, they would automatically hire me. However, they never called me back for an interview. I also applied at Walmart. They called me back, interviewed me and hired me. I did not have to go on unemployment at that time.
I didn't love the job, nor did I hate it. It was just someplace I went to and did what I was told eight hours a day. I never had to be there any earlier than 9:00am and I never had to be there past 9:30pm. I was never asked to come in and cover for someone. It would have been nice to have more jobs like that.
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