Why Kmart Should Fire Me

• I'm rude to customers that piss me off. We get kids coming into the store with nothing better to do than to screw around at Kmart. They're real winners, let me tell you. A group of four of five idiots came in one day, and one of them had the balls to get on the electric wheelchair we keep for the decrepit and morbidly obese customers. He was riding around the store slamming into displays and trying to do wheelies for the amusement of his friends. I walked up to him.
  "Get up." I said simply.
  "But I really hurt my leg." he whined.
  "Yeah? Let's see you walk." Normally, this would be cruel request to make. It's not the sort of thing I'd say to anyone other than little punk teenagers. However, I knew he was lying, and I hate these little fuckers.
  He got up and started to limp like he got his knee shot out in 'Nam. I jumped into the seat of the wheelchair and took off with it, laughing to myself. For good measure, I yelled "SUCKER!" before I turned the corner into men's wear.

• I chased a coworker around the store with an arrow. Josh, a former coworker of mine, handed me a practice arrow (blunt tip--like the ones in high school) and ordered me to put it back in my department. Dutifully, I chucked it behind a display and walked away. Later that evening, he handed it to me again and told me to put it back. I looked down at the arrow, then back at him.
  "Run." I said simply.
  "What?" He asked.
  I repeated myself. "Run."
  He took off running, and I sprinted after him. After chasing him halfway through the store, I threw the arrow at him underneath the big blue light. It barely missed his head, and stuck three inches into a display of light bulbs.

• The management gives me access to firearms. Not as scary as it sounds. When I first started working, there were a couple of BB pistols that had been taken out of their packages and left lying around in a little-used and completely unmonitored stockroom. Josh and I would occasionally walk back there and take turns riddling cardboard displays with BBs.

• Break time. I'm pretty sure everyone does this, but I figure, overall, Kmart has paid me to sit on my ass for about a week. I like to sit up in the stockroom where I can't be seen and just space out for fifteen to thirty minutes at a time. Sometimes I grab a magazine before I go up, sometimes not. Also, my fifteen minute breaks are never shorter than twenty minutes, and my thirty minute lunches are virtually always forty-five minutes long. Not to mention...

• Nap time. This is sort of on the same wavelength. A couple months ago, we were throwing out some of our lawn furniture displays because no one was dumb enough to buy them. For some reason, though, the seat cushions had been put into damaged. (That's where all the damaged merchandise goes so that the store can get credit for it.) I broke into the damaged office, and laid down to take a nap on the cushions for about half an hour. It was damn relaxing.

• Requesting off work.
In the past, I have requested off work for the following reasons. A manager told me the other day that a copy of these all go to into my permanent employee records.
• "Getting drunk"
• "Having a party"
• "Will be hungover"
• "It's my freaking birthday"
• "Will be homeless"
• Breaking stuff. Sometimes when I'm putting stuff back onto the shelves and can't find where it goes, I'll just smash it on the concrete floor in receiving and put it in damaged. That way, I don't have to deal with it.
  When I get bored, angry, or frustrated, I'll sometimes go into the stockroom and pound the living crap out of boxes. Kmart has sold a lot of boxes with knuckle and foot shaped dents in them.
  And that hole in the drywall underneath the Do It Yourself phone? Yeah, that was me.

• Bicycles. The primary perk of working in the sporting goods department is that I'm in charge of dealing with the bicycles. In the summer, I get to bring them in from out front before we close so no one can steal them. No big deal. However, I frequently engage in what I think of as "cart wrangling." This consists of riding a bike out to a cart in the parking lot, grabbing it while still moving, and then trying to aim it into the cart corral. The hard part is doing this without landing flat on my face and without hitting customers, cars, or the building. I've gotten pretty good at it, and I still haven't hit any cars. Scared a couple customers, though.
  Also, when I worked the overnight shift one time, I rode a little girl's bike around the store for half an hour until my manager told me to stop. It was almost 6:00am, and we were all pretty warped from being awake all night. I'm pretty sure that I was giggling to myself the whole time.

• Demoralizing the help. I like to leave anti-motivational graffiti around the store to demoralize the full time workers. Why? Because I hate them. In general, they're lazy, fat, stupid, and incompetent. Now, I could give a rat's ass about how the store fares. I get paid either way. However, I and all the other part time employees have to pick up the slack that these jackasses leave for us.
  I usually leave my mark in out-of-the-way places, but I also enjoy adding to the bathroom stall graffiti. Some of my work includes:
  • Someday you will die.
  • This will never end.
  • Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a career, instead of just a job?
  • Is this really what you wanted to do with your life?
  • GET BACK TO WORK, SLACKASS!
  I hate them all so much...

• Graffiti.There are signs hung around the stockrooms from some forgotten campaign to stop theft. No one knows what they mean anymore, so they're pretty much ignored. They all say: "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO STOP ______ OF THEFT TODAY?" In the blank, someone has written in a random dollar amount. The other day I scribbled on one: "Shot a shoplifter and dismembered the corpse. Stay away from the compactor."