36. A couple of employee stories by a customer, if that counts.
First one: Checking out in a Walmart when the cashier started getting chatty, telling me she mostly worked at WM for the insurance, but her main source of income was as a phone sex operator. She told me how much money she made and straight-up told me she bet I’d be great at it, too. I’m practically phobic of awkward conversations, so I just mumbled something about not having a good “voice” for that, at which point she said, “Oh, you never use your real voice; you make up characters!” Then she proceeded to give me a demo of all of her “characters.” I didn’t go back to that WalMart for years.
Second one is all on me. In a different local WM there was one greeter who was super nice and friendly, and I always stopped to chat with him a few minutes but always just about boring stuff like the weather, nothing personal. For a couple of years. In my defense I had only ever seen two types of people working as WM greeters: the elderly and the disabled (physical or mental); this guy was not old and had no apparent physical disabilities, so I just kind of assumed he had a mental impairment of some sort (the fact he was cheerful about being a WM greeter added to this assumption). Nope. Turns out he also only worked at WM for insurance for himself and his kids, but his “real” job was owning a long-standing karate school and he, himself, was a multi-level black belt (don’t remember what level). He never knew I’d originally assumed he was mentally disabled, and I learned a very valuable (and lasting) lesson about assumptions and judging people by job or appearance.
