I truly felt that a company who would engage in these nefarious practices deserved some heavy duty payback. After our conversation, I went home to plot out one of the most glorious plans for revenge ever conceived - well, maybe not ever conceived by, like, everyone.. but definitely the most glorious ever conceived by ME.
I need to make it absolutely clear that for legal reasons, neither Joe Peacock nor Mentally Incontinent can recommend that anyone ever reenact the following descriptions of my actions If anyone chooses to take it upon themselves to reenact the following plan, we cannot be held liable for the outcome. (We do, however, heartily endorse them if you do them. We won’t accept responsibility for your actions, but we WILL send you some awesome greeting cards and pat you on the back once you are released from jail.)
The day after Thanksgiving is notorious for being the single busiest shopping day of the entire year. Naturally, every single Wal-Mart store in the nation is completely swamped with parents hoping to find great deals on stupid toys that their children will completely destroy within 4 minutes of opening the package. This fact does not stop them from coming in DROVES to hand over their hard earned money for the cheaply made knickknacks. Knowing this, I set upon planning the ultimate revenge which would take place on that infamous day.
Being the guy who set up just about everything in that department for almost 7 months, A few small advantages were mine and mine alone. For instance, I was the only one who knew the lock out codes for the DirecTV system, which was located in the demo cabinet that was actually a floor model of an entertainment center we sold in the furniture department. Along with the DirecTV system was the demo DVD player (which happened to play Video CD’s that could be made on a personal computer, should one feel so inclined) and demo VCR. Incidentally, I was the only employee that even knew that there were keys for that cabinet because one evening I opened the cabinent to find keys hanging from a staple on the inside of the unit. I grabbed them and put them on my keyring, figuring that since I was pretty much the only person here capable of reading the labels on the buttons and therefore was the only one who would ever access the cabinet that they would come in handy. We never ever locked the cabinet, so i quickly forgot the keys even existed. Very conveniently, I happen to accidentally keep those keys after I left the company (the only copy of those keys, actually, which adds to the overall humor). I also happened to be the only one with all the CMOS and screensaver passwords to all the demo PC's in the department. My major advantage was the knowledge that, while there were 2 department phones present on the counters near the registers, there was actually a 3rd line that was active but unused under the main CD rack in the center of the department.
Thanksgiving night, the store closed from 4:00 pm until 12:00 am. At 12:01 am, I entered the store and began working on my plan. The morning manager never got around to filling my position, and 80% of the workforce had the night off for the holiday, so the store was literally my playground.
First, I glided over to the demo machine cabinet and verified that it was unlocked, It was, just as I figured It would be, since I was the only one with keys. I immediately attacked the DirecTV system, locking out every channel except for “The Hot Network”, a hardcore pornography channel which I then ordered a full day of programming for. While in the cabinet, I inserted a special Video CD I had burned that afternoon especially for this occasion into the demo DVD unit, then I put a special VHS tape I made into the VCR. I turned off all the units so that the screens for the televisions would just show black. I then locked the demo cabinet up and stole all the remotes for the systems from the front drawer. After that, I turned up the volume on every single TV to Max. I moved on over to the PCs and changed a few settings on all of them, then rebooted them to lock the passwords in. Finally, I took a cordless telephone from the department and plugged it into the aforementioned vacant store phone jack, hiding the base of the unit with boxes of inventory. I ran over to the pharmacy section to plug in the remote charger and phone receiver so that it would be fully charged for the next morning. Everything in place, I left the store with a gigantic smile on my face.
Naturally, the store was FLOODED starting at 6:00 am that morning, the time at which all the special sales were to begin. The traffic in and out of the store was absolutely astounding. There were lines specifically to wait for a place in line for the registers. Around 11:00 am, I showed up and easily breezed through the store. Due to the volume of customers in the store, I blended right in. Not a single person there recognized me at all. I went over to my rigged electronics department to do a final survey of the area. All the televisions were on, screens black, a small message at the bottom of the screen said “signal unavailable”. All of the demo PC’s had rolled over to their screensavers, which scrolled in blue text on a red background "I AM A LUCKY COMPUTER! TAKE ME HOME!". Moving the mouse or using the keyboard would not disable the screensaver since it had a password. Everything looked ready.
I ran over to my secret hiding area in the pharmacy, the only department not completely ravished by the holiday shopping crowd, and pulled out the cordless phone. I tested it, it worked.. I entered the code for an overhead page and blew into the receiver a few times. Lo and behold, my little puffs were clearly audible over the intercom.
It was time for the festivities to begin.
Using the paging system I had just hijacked, I announced in a clear and resounding tone: "Greetings, Wal-Mart holiday shoppers! Thank you so much for coming out this wonderful day to take advantage of our special deals! One of our unadvertised specials is taking place RIGHT NOW! For the next 30 minutes in the electronic department, if you see a computer with a message scrolling across that says ""I AM A LUCKY COMPUTER! TAKE ME HOME!", that computer's model is 70% off the already low sale price! These computers are first come, first serve, so hurry to the electronics department and as always, thank you for shopping Wal-Mart."
The flood gates opened.
I made my way along with hordes of bargain hunters to the electronics department to witness the lucky shoppers search for the computer models that were "on sale". Astounding! Every single machine had a demo model which scrolled the magic phrase! Wal-Mart's policy is to honor any advertised price, and in-store announcements certainly qualified as an advertisement, so this would naturally put a gigantic dent in their normal operational activity. But my actual intention was not to screw Wal-Mart on the price of their crappy Acer and Packard Bell computers; it was to build an audience for the actual revenge.
As the department reached a capacity bordering on critical, I pulled out my stolen remotes for the demo units and turned all 3 of them on. Immediately, the top row of televisions, at full volume, flipped to images from the DirecTV system which was locked on hardcore pornography, the middle tier of televisions were showing images from the VCR which contained a movie cleverly entitled "Where The Boys Aren't Volume 12 - Sorority Sleep Over", and the bottom row of televisions were playing footage from the DVD system which contained a Video CD chock full of downloaded German “Scheiße” films from various newsgroups across Usenet (if you don’t know what ‘Scheiße’ means, click here for a translation. It's German. You can figure out how to do the rest.).
There is absolutely no way I can describe the resulting chaos better than you are probably imagining it, so I will leave it alone, mentioning only that I barely managed to crawl out of the store because I was doubled over from laughter.
What a happy holiday season I had that year.
I heard later from my nameless friend that the store had to honor the “advertised” sale on all of the computers and that the television “wall o’ filth” actually played at full volume for the better part of an hour, as the department was so packed with spectators that employees could barely move through to the demo cabinet, which they obsessed over unlocking instead of simply turning off the televisions. Overall, the panic and unrest went on for longer than 6 hours. He continued working there, and about 6 months after that glorious and most holy event, he told me that they still hadn’t figured out how I had hijacked the paging system. I have been tempted to pull the entire stunt once again, but in my efforts to leave the store, I neglected to take the charger for the phone with me, and the battery has long since died.
The best part of it all: They accidentally paid me for another 2 weeks after I had been fired. A few weeks after mailing me the check for the work I didn’t actually ever clock in for, they sent a letter explaining that this was an error in the payroll system and requested that I send the money back.
I wrote the word ‘Scheiße’ with a chocolate bar on the letter and mailed it back, wondering if they would get the joke. I then put the money into a tech-heavy stock portfolio which about a year ago lost every cent that it made for me.
Oh well. Easy come, easy go.
