Hello,

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ricardo Lugo. I’m an independent filmmaker and a member of Prize Box Productions. I’ve worked almost every odd job you can think of. I’ve been a janitor, I’ve been a paper boy, I’ve been an assembler, I’ve even worked security once before. However, out of all the jobs I’ve had, none were as influential as working at Walmart. It had both a positive and negative (mostly negative) affect on my life. Working at Walmart was like living through the military song TAPS!
It all started when I was desperately trying to find a job in Port St. Lucie so I could get my verbally abusive stepfather off my back. He resented me for over 20 years for not being able to find a job and contribute to the household. During the last 6 months my mother and I lived with him, I must have applied for Home Depot at least 25 times, Publix 35 times, Target 20 times and Walmart 47 times. There is an overabundance of Walmart’s in Port St. Lucie and this was well before these chains had developed application restrictions.

I finally got called in for an interview at Walmart on July 4th 2011. Three managers interviewed me at the same time. They asked me questions about my previous work experience, which only included making crap high school documentaries. However, they were really interested in my stories of how I interviewed my subjects in these docs. Shortly after telling them these stories, I realized I was talking about how I interviewed people in a job interview! That conversation lasted two hours. Shortly after I left, they called me and asked if I could come in the next day for a second interview. They offered me the job ten minutes in.

On my first day working at Walmart, another employee was hired at the same time. My sister in arms Jennifer. I’m not going to be using any real names in this blog for legal reasons. Our first task was to complete these computer simulators called CBL’s, or Skynet in disguise. These programs were very badly designed Powerpoint’s with 4Kids-level voice overs. This simulator was so bad, it made games like Secret Agent Barbie look fun!
However, this was only beginning! After me and Jennifer finished the horrid CBL’s, we got hit with a video that made ‘The Room” look like an academy award winner! This visual turd was known as “Hazardous Waste Materials!” It was meant to show employees how to deal with chemical spills in the store. Spoiler alert: it failed miserably! The video consisted of extremely bad voice-over, visuals showing spills in stores that were obviously not Walmart and photos that had nothing to do with what the narration was talking about. Jennifer and I remember seeing pictures of goats on fields, nuclear plants, and dog’s being walked.

Once Jennifer and I prevailed over these visual horrors we met someone who I always felt defined the term “Bad-Ass”. I’ll call him Stryker! He was a 6,2 Loss preventions man who spoke in a deep Haitian accent which could strike fear into the heart of any action hero. Stryker was ordered to give us a tour of the store and while he was showing us the arts and crafts department he stopped talking mid sentence and just glared around the store slowly like a hungry predator. He looked back at us and quickly said “I’ll be right back” and rushed off. We continued the tour by ourselves and found out an hour later that Stryker noticed more items missing than usual, just on that he caught two shoplifters in less than an hour after the tour. He was a man that you didn’t want to piss off. But I found out the hard way sometimes( all the time for me) certain people just rubbed him the wrong way.

After the tour we were told to begin our register training. Only three register’s were open out of twenty three. Each register had 30 to 40 customers waiting. A cashier named Esperanza was assigned to train us, the very first thing she said after introducing herself was “The line never ends so don’t try to bring it down!” After 15 minutes of her showing us how to use the register, she wanted us to operate it. Me being a nice guy (Meaning Foolish) I tried to ring people up as fast as I could for an hour. Within that time I got called “A lazy fuck” “An asshole” and “ A slow fuck”! I was destroyed by the end of that hour. Fortunately Jennifer and I were given our final 15 minute break for day. We met a few co- workers in the break room and I told them I hope it slows down by tomorrow it’s crazy busy today. One cashier responded “It’s like this everyday”. Keep in mind everything I just described minus the job interviews happened on the first day!

I worked at Walmart for two years, where I met people that defined intelligence and those who defined sadism. Stay tuned more Walmart stories coming soon!