Cashiering 101 - An attempt at comedy

There isn't really anything new to report so instead I will treat you to a little Wal-Mart Cashier 101.

Your Register
It's always (side note, remember that word. At Wal-Mart it's important). As I was saying, it's always important to keep your register clean at all times. That means making sure trash, roaches and Michael Jackson are nowhere to be found. Make sure that all items are where they're supposed to be (tampons with the candy makes for shaky sales).

Greeting the Customer
When a customer goes through your lane be sure to greet them warmly. Yelling "Get the hell out of my lane!" rarely goes over well with the managers and could result in dock in pay, termination, or a year supply of Spam. Always ask your customer if they found everything alright and ignore them until you are done scanning items. Which leads to the next point:

Scanning Items
Bar codes are a marvel of modern technology. Nobody quite knows how they work, but it is common belief that the item tells the scanner how much it is. You can be sure that when an item is not scanning the item and scanner are deep in conversation. This is when you drag out the scanning gun. It has more or less the same effect that a gun does in the hands of a skilled interrogator. Point, ask questions and fire.

Sacking
This is the most stressful part of the job. Luckily if you can remember this rule you're golden: stuff the entire order into one bag. No, seriously. Keep like items together. Of course, this means you could have a bag that has nothing but lip balm or butt cream. In this situation I have found that there is one thing that will almost always be able to save you: chips. Since chips come in a hermetically sealed package you can put them in with anything. Chips with soda, chips with fish, chips with motor oil, the list goes in. I know what you're probably thinking, what if they don't have chips? Well, good thing almost every customer will have at least 50 bags of chips (or bananas).

Completing the Sale
Tendering, aka forcibly removing money from your customers' wallet/account, is the whole point of you standing at that register. Not only does it keep Wal-Mart afloat, but more importantly it's fueling your paycheck. After you take the money from the customer you give them their reciept and, if they've been decent to you, thank them and tell them to have a nice life. If they've been a real pain in the ass then you just say "Get the hell out of my store!".

Now that you know the basics let's go through a real life scenerio:

YOU: Hi

CUSTOMER: Hi.

YOU: Did you find everything alright?

CUSTOMER: No. I wasn't able to find the strained kumquats and my dinner is all screwed! You go into a store called Wal-Mart and.... HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU DON'T PUT CHIPS WITH RAT POISEN!

YOU: Sorry. Did you want your condoms left out?

CUSTOMER: No, just toss them in with the bananas.

YOU: Your total comes to $68.86.

CUSTOMER: Okay, first I want to use this shopping card....

YOU: That brings it down to $45.67

CUSTOMER: Okay.... umm... here's $16.41....

YOU: $29.26

CUSTOMER: Oh, and here's a wad of coupons.

YOU: You didn't buy any tampons, sir.

CUSTOMER: What are you, blind? I did so... oh forget it. I'll pay the rest on my credit card.

YOU: Your card has been denied, sir.

CUSTOMER: Well, I just used it at Best Buy this morning when I bought my laptop! Geez! Fine, I'll write a check.

YOU: May I see your ID please?

CUSTOMER: Why?

YOU: The register is prompting for it. Have you written check here before?

CUSTOMER: NO! Fine, here's my ID...

YOU: There's your reciept sir. Thank you.

CUSTOMER: Ha! See if I ever shop here again.

ALL CASHIERS: (cheer)

Now you are fully prepared for the job that is cashiering at Wal-Mart. I'll see you all later :-)

*sigh* My "weekend" is now over and all I have to look forward to is asking people if the "found everything alright". Oh, well. Could be worse. At least I'm getting paid ;-). Speaking of which, payday is Thursday again :-D.

I haven't started on my "project", but I did pick up the threads of my GBA Tetris Attack game. I've gotten a bit done through to basic clearing. I'm probably going to work some more on it tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I'll even put up a beta version for you people to test. 'Tis quite cool.

Tonight was the best night of bowling I've ever had (bad news for you people who are pledging per pin). My scores were 180, 166, and 172 for a grand total of 518. Now I'm going to keep an average from now until Bowl 4 Kids going to kind of give those pledgers an idea of how much they're going to be donating. Let's see... carry the 7... square root of 10... 173!

I spent the better part of this evening converting an old useless computer into a file/game/wb server. That was pretty fun (of course the gaming part is the best). And now that is what I'm going to do, game with my homies :-). Later!

It is Sunday and that means today is the last day of work before my two day weekend! WHOO! I've got some more grandiose plans in the line of game programming. However, this time I am not going to program ANYTHING ELSE until this project is done. I'm going to work on the basic framework the next couple of days and once I have something significant I will tell you what that plan is, but until then....

I've got the content of my new site hammered out. All I need to do is fill out the content and once my domain gets transferred (if it ever does) I'll that up for you all to view. Note: Do not use NameAlerts.com for domain hosting. They are teh st00p1dz!

So far I've raised ~$50 for Bowl 4 Kids (assuming I bowl my averge of 130). That's only from two people and I've get a few more to ask yet (grandma, bowling buddies, coworkers, W, etc). I personally am probably going to pledge a little bit too (if I'm under $100 I'll make up the difference). So now I'm getting all psyced about that. Must.... bowl.... 300!!!

Well, I must go now and work on my supersecrecteriffic project! Adios!

Well, here is my first blog post on Blogger. Why the switch? Mainly I was sick of the lack of features in Tetra and don't really have the time/motivation to code them. Secondly, Blogger may give me a little more publicity. If me from six months ago were to meet me now he'd consider me a heathen for moving, but I think it's time that some things were laid to rest. Now that my site will be blog free I am going to devote it to my programming endeavors. It'll probably be just a static HTML site (new design, fo course), but it'll give me a new outlet. If only I had some programs to showcase...

In other news, the cashiering job is going quite nicely. Debbie (my superviser) said that a job opened up in GM (general merchandise) receiving, but I'll probably stick with cashiering unless there's a significant raise in pay. Believe it or not I've actually come to enjoy cashiering. One good thing that can be said about it is that things work in a very linear fashion. You work on one person at a time as they come through your line, whereas layaway (on a busy day) you'd be grabbing several people's stuff and trying to get that stuff to them on a first come, first serve basis is near impossible. The one downside is that when there's nobody coming through your lane things get dull... fast. I was working until 2am on Sunday and after 11pm the customers just stopped coming. When you're the only lane open in the entire store and you've got no customers, that's pretty bad. However, there were a couple points where I went to "cashier" in sporting goods (I put that in quotes because I never actually rang anybody up). I did, however, get the keys to all the guns, knives and bullet cases. Talk about power :-D.

But enough about work, now on to the good stuff. On Saturday I bit the bullet and bought myself a DS (electric blue, even :-)). Of course, I couldn't make a huge decision like that and not have some trouble. The first DS I got had a dead pixel on the top screen and of course my parents are like "Well, I can't see it.", "It's only one pixel out of 600,000". Well, I saw it plain as day and there was noway in heck I was going to live with that. So I went back and the second one was fine :-). But you're probably wondering why I finally decided to get one (especially those who've heard me say the infamous "you're "DiS" which I diss"). One word: Mario Kart DS. I rented this game from GameFly over Christmas and I was hooked. It's freakin' awesome. So I've been having fun playing that (alongside Yoshi's Island).

Finally, I signed up for the Bowl 4 Kids Sake tournement that Wal-Mart is sponsering. Of course, I didn't realize I was going to have to solicit money out of people (relatives of mine, you hvae been forewarned). But either way it should be a lot of fun :-).

Okay, I think I've gotten everything out. Peace out!

Fun with faces!

Found a website that is currently beta testing some faceial recognition software. You can upload your face and have it match it against a database full of celebreties. Well, I dumped a picture of me and and apprently I look like Tim Berners-Lee :-D (actually there is a striking resemblene). Now isn't that cool :-). See ya and have fun.

Tetra updates!

I was kind of feeling the lack of Tetra's blog features today so I went in and started piddling around with stuff. As you can see the archives list is now sorted in descending order and I also have a little links bar (I can add as many side bars as I want too :-)). Also, fixed a few problems in the message board code and cleaned up a couple other things that had been bothering me for months.

I got my USBC card today which brings to to the following important note: tomorrow is bowling again. YAY! After that I'll be working three days and then get Saturday off. YAY! Then I'll work Sunday and I'll be off again. YAY! (I 'spect that's getting annoyiing :-P).

Well, that's about all I wanted to say. But before I go I'll give a shout out to my coworker buddy, Blake! :-D See ya :-)

So it's 2006... I smell no difference

Ah, the new year has arrived and with it a job change for me. That's right I achieved my life long dream and got a part time job at the Sizzler! No, really. I am now a cashier at Wal-mart. I originally wanted to be a cart pusher because cashier was something I wanted to be even less. There was a bit of confusion for a while because I told Debbie (schedule lady) I didn't really like cashiering and I'd rather be a cart pusher. My guess is she misunderstood, got it reversed and set things in motion for me to become a cashier (they even changed my job code to cart pusher so they could change it to cashier which had me even more confused). But tonight was my first night working the register (being watched, of course) and it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. I have tomorrow and Tuesday off so that makes things even sweeter.

Speaking of Tuesday there's bowling again (thank heavens)! Now that I have a job I appreciate the bowling night even more than I did before. Tomorrow Mom and I are going to go to Tulsa and do some shopping. I've got $50+ dollars of spending money ($300 if I borrowed from savings, but that's college money now). I'm thinking of buying Yoshi's Island or Mairo World (if I can find it :-P). I've even tossed the idea of getting a DS and Mario Kart DS around, but my laptop is cool enough for me at the moment ;-).

But, now that I've rambled on long enough, I bid you all a happy new year. 2005 was quite an eventful year for me and 2006 will probably bring some interesting things. Stay here for the latest :-)