Walmart Nightmares Episode 1

This is something I've been meaning to do for a while, but never got the inspiration to do it until now. This series on my blog will be documenting various stories of my time working at a retail Walmart mostly as a stocker and truck unloader, with maybe some excerpts from my brief 3 month stint in electronics here and there. Any names brought up will obviously not be the individuals' actual names, be it a co-worker or a nameless customer. I

With the intro out of the way, let's start with the time my store got flooded...except not really.

This was towards the time I started at my main job as a stocker for a set of aisles containing Clorox wipes, air freshener spray, detergent, fabric softener, disinfectant spray, mops, brooms, and so much more. This would be my main job for the past four years, all at a whopping $11 an hour, not a whole lot I realize now, but considering this was my first "real" job, it was more than I was making before, which was whatever hand-me-downs family members gave me here and there.

Let me explain the work structure of the Walmart I work at. Mind you, where you work will probably change how the hours are arranged, but it generally went sort of like this for your average grunt employee:

1. Clock into work, go to work area, work for 2 hours.
2. Break for 15 minutes, then go to work for about 2 more hours.
3. Lunch break for usually an hour, but sometimes, especially in our department, and depending on how the truck unloading process was going or the amount of work to be done, management or our supervisor would ask us to come back after 30 minutes. Compared to my current job, even 30 minutes is a godsend.
4. Come back from lunch break, work for 2 hours.
5. Last 15 minute break for the night, then back to work for 2 hours.

This was my general structure at my Walmart. The flooding incident happened while I was on the lunch break mentioned at 3 in this list. I was just at our store's local fast food joint getting lunch, and I want to say as I was sitting down to eat, the alarm went off. People weren't leaving the store, and management wasn't trying to evacuate anyone, so it seemed oddly non-urgent, and I kept eating. Fast-forward to me clocking back in and returning to my aisles, and I go to start working, and then this one really big guy came by and told me that assistance was needed over by the freezer where the frozen food is stored (not the meat, but stuff like your Digorno's Pizza, and other dairy food products. Milk was in its own section of the backroom). I noticed in passing that they had these metal divider things with wheels on them that was essentially a way of keeping customers from possibly slipping on the water leakage that was happening from a pipe in the freezer itself from what I remember.

There wasn't time to make out the details though, as we had to salvage as much of the frozen food in the freezer as possible. Eventually though, I was put on water-leak-containment-duty with trying to sweep out as much of the water as possible from the store, as there was an emergency exit door that would allow us to get the water outside. Thing is, this water started to rise up ever so slightly to where even my really nice sports shoes started getting ruined along with my socks. There was a department manager helping to sweep all of this up, and he just removed both his socks and shoes!

Eventually, we got it contained to the point where we could return back to our aisles (with not enough time to finish them, btw), but that was quite a night to remember.





But what will Silent_Gunner recount next? Find out, on the next episode of Walmart Nightmares!