Wal-Mart Daze

OK—somebody up there figure this out: I knew my mother for over 50 years, was extremely close to her, and had her die in my arms. I worked for Wal-Mart for ten years, learned from it, laughed at it, bought into it, and then they laid me off. So about what do I dream more?

Wal-Mart!

Today, it was a waking dream: I was back working at the Home Office, which wasn’t the Home Office—you know how it is in dreams…

…oooops, sorry. I know that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, and a close second is hearing about people’s therapy sessions. So here’s the gist: neither Raf and I have had a vacation for a year, since we have an ancient cat—who happens to be Raf’s favorite—and we have gotten it through our heads that only Raf can feed it. So we have stayed, coping with major construction on the street outside, dealing with the water flowing into our apartment from the apartment upstairs. (Sharp Readers will remember that the situation was only addressed by men rappelling down the side of our building, cutting / pulling / plastering and most fun of all, jumping into our apartment, appearing when least expected as I was writing, and then requiring to be let out, since our level of cat-paranoia dictates that no one is to be trusted not to let the cat out. This I get from my mother, whose friends used to forestall the inevitable and say to her, “don’t let the cat out….”)

“It seems lie it’s been a long year of doing nothing but stamping out fires,” said my shrink—damn, said I wasn’t gonna do that—and it occurred to me, it had.

“Look at it this way,” said Lady, who was trying to insert some perspective into my life, because my new response to the annoying response from healthy people to my continuous—or is it constant or more likely, is it both—whining about the Chikungunya is to say, “well, at least it isn’t Ebola!”

So what do I say?

“I booked my flight to Nigeria next Tuesday.”

In fact, that’s what my shrink—dammit, stop walking into my blog—was about to tell me, when I cut him off. And he did raise his eyes a bit when I told him about the Nigeria bit. So then we decided to compare the symptoms of depression with the symptoms of Chikungunya—and couldn’t there be like a speed-dial or speed-type for that annoying word—but it would take to long. Besides, I had realized: Chikungunya is the marriage—at least for me—of severe depression and arthritis.

“Well, is your life better than it was five years ago?” persisted Lady.

Yes.

Because today is the second Friday of the month, I’m almost certain that this was taking place at 8AM in the Home Office: the monthly meeting, which would have started off with the cheers for the four formats—Wal-Mart, Sam’s, Amigo grocery store, and Super-Ahorros (a hybrid between grocery store and convenience store). Next the sales, followed by Corporate Affairs, followed by a talk by someone-in-the-community-doing-something-important, followed by the inevitable motivational speech. And before and after each of these things? The speaker would shout: ¿Como te sientes? Or “how do you feel?”

A roared answer: “Super-bien, ohh, ahh, ayi—YES!

It was a rite of passage for beginning employees, who tended to stumble out of the auditorium, rubbing their eyes, and reaching for their cell phones, to call back that recruiter and discuss alternative opportunities.

You could buy in or buy out of all this enforced silliness, and I chose to buy in, principally since nobody knew—least of all me—what in the world I was doing, so nobody bothered me. But for those people who had bosses and bigger bosses and then the mega-bosses? It was brutal: I once asked the electronics buyer how he coped with having to sell 60 million bucks in sales per year? His answer? You don’t think about it—you go day by day, battling the Distribution Center—howling about your high inventory levels—the store managers—cutting expenses by having no one in the Electronics Department on Saturday afternoon, and especially cringing at the sight of your boss, reliably coming at you with reports in hand. Because you might sell 60 million bucks, but what about your margin? And in fact, margin was the least of it: Wal-Mart had found a way to measure everything, and busily put the buyer’s assistant at work to produce the reports that would kill you daily, weekly, monthly, and culminate in your performance evaluation.

This was a cumbersome affair that started—sadistically—with the “self-evaluation.” So it was sort of like the confessional followed by the inquisition. Nobody but me took it as anything but deadly serious: the more neurotic among us would spend at least two weeks preparing the thing. But after two evaluations, I learned two things: unless I brought Sam Walton back from the grave, in his prime, and willing to fly his private plane to every Wal-Mart in the country, I would never get anything except an “Performing as Expected”—read “average”—evaluation. The second thing? My supervisor—an excellent woman, by the way—would always have to find some thing wrong. Wait—it was never couched like that, it was an opportunity, or an area for development, or some such nonsense.

“Marc should more fully integrate with different departments of the company, in order to strategize and incorporate synergies between his role in the company and the departments to which he offers services.”

The boss would explain all this, and I would nod, all the while wondering, ‘hey should we go to the beach this weekend? Or maybe get together with Sonia….’

Then, having absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do, I would be asked for feedback, which was crucial / vital, because this whole affair was not a professional crucifixion, but rather an opportunity to grow professionally. So I would nod sagely, agree profoundly, thank them—I sorry to say—fulsomely, and then be present with a letter from the director of the department thanking me for my hard work, urging me to do more of it, and—in the last line that was the first line everybody read—tell me what my raise would be.

But guess what? The next we would review that “goal” about which I had done nothing, and wow! Had I improved!

My response to all this?

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to say that I was an “average” employee, so I gave myself marks that were just under the highest number—five, as I remember. This I did twenty minutes before the deadline to hand the thing in. Why waste time?

Only later did the director of finance confide—the raises were figured out before the evaluations were done. In short, the whole thing was pretty much a farce, at least in financial terms.

So Lady, do I miss it?

No.

Nor do I miss what Wal-Mart did to its customers, who were so desperate to get a cheap—as you can see in the video below—TV that they would have run over their grandmother to get to it.

The other thing I don’t miss?

Smiling until your jaw hurt.

Oh—and as you can see in the other video—pretending that our only interest was to get up in the morning and think up new, splendid ways to help the community.

“The best day of working at Wal-Mart is the day you leave it,” I said to the director of Human Resources on the day they officially terminated me. But I did not mean it harshly. Nor did she take it that way.

“It can be,” she replied.

Know what?

Think it was!