Just an Earth-Bound Misfit: The Rantings of an Aging, Armed, Pinko Chick

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"Thou Shalt Get Sidetracked by Bullshit, Every Goddamned Time." -- The Ghoul

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck,
"FOFF" = Felonious Old Fat Fuck,
"COFF" = Convicted Old Felonious Fool,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset,
A/K/A P01135809, A/K/A Dementia Donnie, A/K/A Felon^34,
A/K/A Dolt-45, A/K/A Don Snoreleone

Monday, March 7, 2011

Wal-Mart is Hiring. Only Cowards Need Apply.

Because if you are anything other than a craven, lily-livered, pants-shitting coward, Wal-Mart will fire you if you try to do anything about a dangerous situation (other than fleeing or curling up behind a desk).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: Wow. And people think unions are silly....look at some of the crap employers fire for, and you realize how often a bit of bargaining power could be useful.; 3/07/2011 11:25 AM
BadTux said...: That said, the policy exists for a reason. The dude with the gun was accused of trying to steal a laptop. Wal-Mart has decided that human lives are more important than a laptop, and that if someone starts waving around a gun because he wants to steal a laptop, let him go -- you can always buy another laptop, but if you try to subdue the dude and he manages to shoot and kill someone in the process of doing so, well.

Here's what I was told to do when I was a pizza delivery driver, if anybody ever tried to mug me: Give the mugger the pizza and all the money in my pocket, and leave. Then report it to management and the police after I reached safety. I wasn't supposed to have more than $20 in my pocket anyhow, and the pizza was the pizza store's, not mine, so why should I care that the mugger got it? Is my life worth more than $20? Duh!

Now, as the article points out, clearly there's a different scenario where the gun-toting person has actually fired shots at someone or there is a reason to believe he intends to do so, in which case the defense of human life comes into play. But in this particular case, nobody claims that this incompetent thief was about to fire his weapon. The thief wanted only to get away and was waving his weapon around like a magic "get out of my way" talisman, sort of like the dude in Fresno recently who thought waving around a .45 ACP would impress a bear (for the record, the bear took it away from him and shoved it up his rear, accidentally discharging it in the process, which scared away the bear but also left the dude rather mauled). A dangerous situation, but hardly as dangerous as trying to tackle an armed robber who's showing no signs of wanting to kill people (because he would have already done so if he were a homicidal maniac rather than wave the gun around threatening people, duh).

So in my opinion, Wal-Mart was right to let these guards go. Their behavior endangered themselves and possibly others if the gun had gone off while they were wrestling with the dude (remember, those stores have paper-thin walls, so the bullet would have gone right through it into the store proper). Is a stolen laptop worth the life of an innocent bystander? That's a no-brainer to me...

- Badtux the Practical Penguin; 3/07/2011 6:06 PM
Comrade Misfit said...: Can you be sure, Badtux, that any time someone pulls a gun that all they intend to do is wave it around as a magic wand?

And if their policy is to let anyone go who threatens to use force, why not just throw open the frickin' doors?

The article also mentions that Wal-Mart's policy is that their employees can never defend their lives. No exceptions.

Wal-Mart is one of the fonts of evil in this country.; 3/07/2011 6:19 PM
BadTux said...: Like I said, I've been the recipient of similar training from one of those big multi-national corporations on what to do if confronted by an armed robber, and in no case do they mention that you can't defend yourself if you fear for your own life. The whole point of the corporate policy after all is that your life is more important than the corporation's property. What they *do* say is that unless there is some reason to do otherwise, you should cooperate with the armed robber because the very fact that he demanded your money means that he doesn't intend to kill you as long as you cooperate -- otherwise he would have simply killed you in the first place and taken the money from your corpse.

As for ascertaining this guy's intentions, how about taking his own words at face value, i.e., "get back or I'll shoot"? In general, if someone pulls a gun and is intending to kill you, he will just kill you -- he won't stand around talking about it and give you a chance to overpower him. That's the difference between a sociopathic murderer and the rest of us -- a murderer acts, he doesn't talk about it.

As for "throwing open the doors to armed robbers", that's why Wal-Mart has all those friggin' video cameras recording to a disk farm locked away in a sealed room in the back -- so that the video can be played on the evening news and cops can arrest the perp afterwards after one of the perp's "buddies" turn him in for the reward. And if the cops *don't* manage to collar the perp... well. At least everybody's alive.

In short, *if* there were any evidence that this dude was about to kill someone, I'd be as outraged as you that the people who took him down got fired. But given that there's no such evidence... well. Human lives are more important than property. Period.

- Badtux the Priorities Penguin; 3/07/2011 6:34 PM