Blueshirt Confessional

It's true that I currently have a pool of 2 friends available for wacky hijinks. However, during the lightning round all points are doubled, so it's still anybody's game.

In case you're curious, we're playing by the New Simplified Rules and using the base scoring system:

Available friends: 50 points
Unavailable friends (out of state): 25 points
Unavailable friends (in state, always too busy): 15 points
Mysteriously Vanished friends: 10 points
Acquaintances: 25 points for the first, 5 for every additional one

We did add a few house rules. Instead of reducing a friend's value to its square root when they have an asshole attached to them, we simply deduct 10 points. Also, we don't use any of the "Girlfriend modifier" nonsense the New Simplified Rules tried to usher in.

A lot of old-schoolers will tell you the game's heyday was back in the early 90's, when the "Skills and Thrills!" expansion set came out. It had its charms, but half of the rules are now either out of date, or depend too much on trying to rate the quality of your friends, which seems a bit demeaning. Personally, I just think there are people out there who like doing complicated math for its own sake. (I know I could download one of a dozen freeware programs to do the math for me, but I just don't have the patience.)

For no raisin, I should tell you about my own current employment.

The first step to recovery is to admit the truth: I work at Wal-Mart. It seemed harmless enough at the time. I had just moved, and The House That Sam Built was the first employer to offer me both a job and a wage that would pay my bills.

One thing I never figured on was the atmosphere of fear that wafts down from the management. Every person I've met in the corporate structure is concerned with Wal-Mart's many enemies, and is not hesitant to say so. The media is a prime boogeyman, looking for any opportunity to destroy Wal-Mart. The vendors who restock Coke and Frito-Lay are always suspect, because everyone knows that they really make their money by stealing product. Shrinkage can only come from employees recklessly destroying property in secret. Unless it comes from theft, which can come from anywhere. Every business Wal-Mart has destroyed now stands as an example of the store's own mortality. Only by constantly growing can Wal-Mart hope to outpace their enemies and live another day. But the bigger they grow, the stronger their enemies will become.

I've had to watch at least ten different training videos, and the only one to feature "real actors" was the one informing me about the dangers of union ninjas tricking me into signing away my soul. These actors are much worse than the random employees they hired to enact the skits on the other videos, and Wal-Mart missed a prime opportunity to hire Sean Bean to proclaim that "Wal-Mart has no unions. Wal-Mart needs no unions!" Instead, a number of people stare into the camera, and talk about how Wal-Mart is not anti-union. Wal-Mart is pro-employee. There is an "open door policy" that means anyone can complain to anybody at anytime, so it is impossible for problems to happen.

Then there are clips of union workers accosting employees, and giving them cards to sign. It is explained that by signing the card, you sign away all your rights, and will end up getting paid less due to union arbitration. The actual reason you'd get paid less, "Wal-Mart will raze the store to the ground to prevent the contamination from spreading," is never mentioned. I'm fairly sure it's illegal for them to say that, but the honesty would be refreshing.

This goes on for a while. Afterwards, a manager explained to us that since Wal-Mart is the richest company in the world, unions want to use us to become richer than Croseus. I'm willing to believe that, with the caveat that they'd try to make my life better in order to keep access to that font of cash. The part after that explaining that any monkey could do a union job for seven bucks, instead of the fifteen they demand, was less inspiring.

But that does lead into Wal-Mart's surprisingly seductive philosophy. They claim that by selling things for a low enough price, and paying out even less, they strive to lower the cost of living for the area. As Wal-Mart grows larger, this will ripple out until a dollar is equal to its 1950's value.

Sadly Wal-Mart is far from consistent about applying this principal. That's a shame, because I'm a sucker for economic theories that sound like they came out of a pulp novel. They don't even have an entertaining name for it, like Sam's Hammer.