Tuesday, February 28, 2012

RetailWorkDay vs. Tech Routine. Also: Social Engineering at Wal-Mart

Inspiration: 

There's an annoying feeling that comes over me realizing I'm wasting my intellectual capacity and potential being a pawn for the corporate power structure. I know that I'm better than where I'm at but don't quite have the skills necessary for some of the tech jobs I see when frequenting Indeed.com. So I need TIME to build those skills, but I spend my time behind a register dealing with slow people who STILL don't know how to use a credit card slider in the 21st century.

Enter Wal-Mart. "The Death Star" as one of my professes put it. I could hear everybody's thoughts telling me that I sold out. Things would be different if I just stuck with my first true love, technology. Gave it up temporarily because I thought I wasn't 1337 enough compared to my computer tech classmates who had a little more luck and a little less ADD than I did. (OK, and I will admit that I'm a lot more motivated than I was back then).

I know that I'm going to get out of that soul-killing place as soon as possible. Maybe the good thing about working there is the fact that I know that I don't want to be like all the "lifers" there who don't have any other career options because of their situations, or the fact that they don't know anything else. I WILL escape from retail. I WILL get the certifications and skills I need. I will become something greater than myself and go back and laugh in the faces of all my teachers. I will see all the bullies and jocks in high school that end up getting office jobs, and they are miserable because they never pursued what they wanted to do. And oh yea, they're balding in their late 20's because they work at a shitty job, and they drive their piece of shit cars back to their dull-ass homes and watch TV with their average looking wives (if they actually find somebody that will want to settle down with them and their piss-poor incomes).

So this is what I do for fun at Wal-Mart, I cracked the customer service survey code. Every third receipt has a survey code at the top, and if you go online and take it, you could win a $1,000 gift card. So I actually started observing these survey codes and noticed a patter. There's 11 digits, and during each print, only the last digit changes. It always goes down the alphabet, if it's a letter, and up in numbers if it's a number. So it increments basically. When one cycle completes, the second to last digit or number does the same and increments by one.

7DKYZBHTZ4QC
7DKYZBHTZ4QG


This is an example of how it would increment. The "7D" hasn't changed since I've kept records, but the "KYZ" went a long time without changing before it finally changed. I'm also really sure that the "TZ" doesn't change, but I think I've also seen TY. The section of  "BH" changes every day. "4" seems to change whenever you change registers. The rate at which the last letter or number increments is usually by 2 or 3. So for instance, the hop from C def G, has 3 spaces in between. But sometimes it could be C de F.

Now, what could be the use for this? The only idea that I've came up with is to actually take the
survey online, which I did. If you're a cashier like me, you could just pretend that you're somebody else and make yourself look awesome. While you're at it, you can give your score low scores on things like "Has the lowest prices" because you want prices to be lower, so trash your store for they're lack of low prices. Also, things like "Restrooms are spotless and clean." Well, we fired our maintenance guy, so the restrooms look like vikings came in and pooped zombies everywhere. So that category gets a low score. You want to see bathrooms get clean? Do the same at your store. The thing that I loved most about the survey was the fact that you didn't even have to enter your name! You could remain anonymous until the part where you actually enter for a chance to win the $1,000 gift card. Then just put credentials of somebody you know (with their permission).

So that's it. Go have fun and change your workplace for the better. Now you actually have a say!

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