I was in my first year of college at the time and was working for Roadway Package Systems on the overnight shift. RPS was a cheap knockoff of Federal Express or UPS, only without all the customers and apparently safety regulations, as we had at least 15 employees out on workers comp at any given time. What THEY were doing when they got hurt, Ill never know, because all I ever saw anyone do was basically sit around and move a few boxes here and there to create the illusion that we deserved our $7.00 an hour. My job function consisted mostly of breaking open the occasional Nerf shipment and playtesting the toys all night. Sure, that stuff was meant for someone else, but the companys insurance would cover it. It was free Nerf as far as I was concerned. I decided to quit RPS one night (and by "quit", I mean to say that I physically demeaned the 5' 2" late night security guard by rubbing his head and calling him "cutie". This was met rather quickly by the blunt end of his Mag-Lite and a veritable honor guard of an escort out of the building), and since I had just lost my scholarship to college due to sleeping in class all day - because of late night work, oddly enough - and still had the futile intention to graduate, I was desperate for a late-night solution to my funds-to-expenditure ratio problem. I had to do SOMETHING for money. I thought about whoring my body out to dirty old men or selling hash made from yard grass and pencil shavings to high school kids, but I felt that as a future writer (haha, right), I needed, for once in my life, to indulge in something TRULY dark and evil... Something from which immeasurable pain and embarrassment would come, so that I could have an experience to draw upon for inspiration in the future. Naturally, Wal-Mart was the first thing that came to mind. I heard about the position from a friend of mine who, at his request, shall remain nameless. He was working the early morning shift at the time. He explained that the electronics department needed a full time employee on the overnight shift because the last person who worked there was caught masturbating to a Cindy Crawford workout tape at 2 AM while the other employees were in the break room on "lunch". I'm not kidding. This story was quickly validated by the other employees on the shift the day I started. In all honesty, I felt kinda bad for the poor guy. He just felt an urge and decided to satisfy it, and I'm sure that it didn't occur to this dynamo of analytic thought that even though he was in the back corner of the department and it may have felt private and fairly secure, it still placed him square in the middle of a gigantic store chock full of security cameras (of which only 2 worked: one of the registers and the shoe department were under constant surveillence. The rest of the store, however, was shopliftland), customers and employees. Once the charges were filed and he was serving time for public exposure, Im sure he learned his lesson and will never ever do it again. I decided to give it a shot, so I showed up one Wednesday at 2:00 pm for the Wal-Mart pre-interview videocassette viewing. After that hearty 30 minute nap, I was huddled into a corner of the room with a manager to begin the actual interview. Believe it or not, the interview process for Wal-Mart was pretty goddamned thorough, especially considering the job paid 6 dollars an hour and entailed wearing a blue schmock, cleaning up after dullards and answering, for the 100th time in an hour, the exact same questions that should be common sense. I cannot count the number of times this exact exchange would take place on a given day: Customer:Excuse me, do you have a Toy Department? What I was thinking:"What??? Do we have a TOY DEPARTMENT??? What the hell kind of question is that! This is WAL-MART, flapjack. The toy department is only the biggest department in this store! Does that extra chromosome impair your vision, too? Can you not see the gigantic blue and yellow sign hanging up when you walk in the door that says 'TOYS'?!?" What I actually said:"Yeah, it's down there." No, I wasn't at ALL bitter. Anyway, after a 2 hour interview, a drug test, multiple calls to the references I listed and a 2 week waiting period, I was finally accepted into the ranks of the Sam Walton elite: I became Joe "The Overnight Electronics Department Employee" Peacock. Oh sure, the title may SOUND all regal and exciting, but in reality, the job was a complete nightmare. First off, you absolutely must understand one crucial fact about life - and this fact will remain constant forever: NO ONE NORMAL works the overnight shift ANYWHERE. This is ESPECIALLY evident at Wal-Mart, where not only are you working overnight in a gigantic wasteland of a career path, you are doing so along side people who clean department store floors and stock Liquid Dawn dish soap and various salty Golden Flake snacks on shelves 8 hours a night for a living. IN GEORGIA. These people werent exactly what one would consider to be members of the conversational elite. I would have believed that these people were only a protein strand away from being considered single-celled beings, except that it definitely takes more than one cell to produce the smells that eminated from most of them. Add to this conglomeration of educationally inept rednecks the fact that they actually had quite an elaborate social structure built into their little group, one that did NOT readily include people who pronounce the word "green" with only one syllable or have, at any point in their lives, read so much as the advertisement on a book of matches. It turned out that the overnight shift at Wal-Mart wasn't a very stimulating work experience. My first few weeks were rife with frustration, the likes of which I had never experienced before and honestly havent experienced since. Because I was the new kid, and because I just did NOT belong in their little social structure, I ended up the victim of several "funny" little pranks. I was told that the electronics person on overnight had to cover for the pet department, which was on the opposite end of the store. I was also informed that during my down time I was to pitch in and help other departments stock their wares. It was common for the first few weeks to find me putting away stock that wasn't in my department, meanwhile being paged back to my department every 10 minutes for customers who, according to the paging person, had mysteriously "just left". Between stocking bars of Ivory, running to my department every 10 minutes for phantom customers, and jogging over to the pets department to scoop fish for people who had no intention of actually purchasing them, I was pretty worn out every day when my shift ended. It was about a month before I found out that neither the Ivory nor the fish were my responsibility, and that since my department was home to some of the most expensive and easily shoplift-able items in the store, leaving my department was actually a HUGE no-no. For all of my hard work and willingness to pitch in around the various departments, I received a big fat "Needs Improvement" on my 1 month probationary report - which, oddly enough, only bothered me because of the idea that Wal-Mart actually had 1-month probationary reports for people doing such mundane tasks. Once I learned the truth about my extra duties and subsequently told those who asked me to do them to fuck themselves, things kind of leveled out and became actually quite simple for me. My daily routine eventually ran as follows: I would arrive at the store about 10 pm, help the 3rd shift person clean up, receive my stock about midnight, put it all away by 1:00, and kick back and watch the brand-new digital satellite tv network that had just come out, or some of the latest in this new movie technology called "DVD" while doing my homework until 6 AM, when I left the store for class. I was becoming quite happy with my routine, despite the fact that I was surrounded by undereducated redneck mollusks who, while I was watchi