amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

Today I’d like to educate you about what my local Walmart is the WORST Walmart in the chain.

I’ll be presenting you a series of stories that will illustrate how my Walmart experience is almost never a positive one in Columbia City, Indiana.

I’ve been contemplating writing this blog entry for some time now. Most of the times I will run in to a nice employee at this Walmart and then I feel guilty about coming home and bitching about this store but finally I’ve had enough.

Sit down, prepare yourself to hear my rants and raves about our Walmart and enjoy my woes.

Recently I went in to Walmart at about 11pm at night. I often hit Walmart at this time to purchase Nintendo Wii games. Hell I even bought my first Nintendo Wii at this Walmart location one night at about midnight. I get done working on work stuff and need something to help me unwind so I head to Walmart and find myself a Nintendo Wii game.

One night while doing this I went to the electronics section and noticed some new gaming magazines. One of which caught my eye so I picked it up and checked it over to see if it was something that I’d be interested in purchasing.

I started to put in back in the holder when a police officer and a store employee approached me.

At first I was glad to see the store employee… I was going to purchase three Nintendo Wii games and they keep them locked up so she could get them out for me so I could buy them.

She had a mean look on her face though. She approached me and asked to see my ID. I declined and told her I didn’t have it with me. Why would she need to see my ID? I hadn’t yet asked to purchase any games and when I did I would have gladly provided it. Right now I was simply looking at various items.

What she doesn’t realize is that I am a young adult. As such I have what we call a disposable income. I many times will spend my hard earned cash on video games, sodas, and other things that won’t really mean jack in a few years.

I digress, the police officer approached me and then asked me for ID. Knowing my rights I declined. It was about this time that I decided to leave the Walmart and take my purchase elsewhere.

I started to head for the door of the Walmart fully expecting the police officer to have more police officers in the area ready to pull me over for no reason (that is how my town police rolls).

I didn’t make it to the door however. The employee stopped me again and said if I didn’t show her my ID she would have me arrested. I said that I would not.

She then told me I needed to leave the Walmart. As I began to tell her that was what I intended the police officer approached and said he would be handcuffing me if I didn’t leave right now.

At the time I was two days away from entering the Indiana State Police academy so I didn’t want any trouble and agreed to leave. I would have honestly agreed to leave anyways because I am NOT a trouble maker and never have been.

The employee stops me again on my way to the door. She tells me if I let her see my ID and I can prove that I am at least 18 I can stay in the store. That Columbia City has a curfew and Walmart enforces it. I tell her I am twenty-two years old, that I am the President of the local company and that I am highly offended. She tells me to “get the fuck out”.

I leave the Walmart.

The next morning I call Walmart and ask to speak with the manager. I ask for her specifically by name and when she will not take my call I leave a message saying that I will call back again the next day.

The next day I call back again. I finally get a hold of her and tell her my story and that I would never shop at Walmart again. At least not her Walmart and that I was considering calling her District Manager and reporting my story.

She was actually a kind soul and I couldn’t be terribly mad at her because of the actions of a rouge employee. She explained to me that it is not Walmart’s policy to enforce the city curfew because Walmart is a private business and not the police.

I couldn’t agree more with her assessment of the situation and she assures me that it will be fixed.

Regardless of the case I stay away from that Walmart for a period of time.

My fiancee loves Walmart sadly. Granted she was mad when I told her what happened but she claims it is the only place to shop in our town. Which is true… we could always go ten minutes up the road to the next town where a great deal of stores are but she won’t do that.

So we start going to the worst Walmart in the chain again. The Columbia City Walmart.

This particular Walmart store even before the ID incident wasn’t my favorite store in the world.

It is almost always horribly dirty. You will often see huge stains on the floor, spilled product, leaks and water coming down from the ceiling, the bathroom if often a mess, the merchandise is often in shambles and doesn’t look like it has been front-faced or laser-lined in weeks, the items you get from the bakery are often old, hard, and crusty the day you get them and the store is almost always out of stock of the most basic items.

I already am not a fan of Walmart. If I have to shop at a Walmart store though I’ll go out of my way to go to another store in the chain because many times the selection and environment is just better.

Not my fiancee though. She is just another blind consumer. Sigh.

Meaning we of course return to the worst Walmart in the chain often because she likes to be a blind consumer and doesn’t care how shitty the place is because the prices are good (not really that good though).

Finally this past week she started to see what I’ve been saying for months about this Walmart. She started to get angry and taking it out on me. Which of course just let to a large argument and later my typing of this blog entry to get my stress out.

The other day we went in with a very simple shopping list.

As we began shopping we noticed they didn’t have any sugar in stock. Not a big deal.

Then we begin to look for salt, Coke,  and a plethora of other basic items and found them to be out of stock on nearly everything. Tiffany started to get very frustrated.

I try not to let it frustrate me… everything about Walmart is already a huge frustration for me. Especially this Walmart.

In the end we weren’t able to get over 30 items on our shopping list.

The people at the Columbia City Walmart as I’ve already said are horribly unprofessional as this week proved to me once again.

We went to a self-checkout lane. Apparently the lady who was using it before us only got one item. She realized she forgot milk at the back of the store and took her one item and left the self-checkout to get her milk. We didn’t know this of course, walk up and scan our first item. Ten seconds later the lady watching over the self-checkouts comes over and says… “You should look next time someone may be using it”. I thought WHAT THE FUCK. I can think of no reason at all for her to be such a bitch over nothing.

So we started putting our items in the bag and she came over and asked us to stop and before saying anything more voids our transaction and tells us to move to another lane because “this one was already being used”.

Uhhhh. Okay?!?

So we move to the one next to it and I make a remark to Tiffany about how much Walmart sucks and what a bitch that lady was not knowing she was right behind me. She gets mad and voids our transaction and tells us to go to a regular checkout lane.

Even better on the way out we are stopped and our bags searched.

Yeah Walmart in Columbia City… its great… let me tell you
The people aren’t the worst thing though. Our Walmart is the DIRTIEST you are going to find in the chain. We’ve seen and taken pictures of roaches and even rats in our Walmart in the past week. We made some calls to a few insepectors and the good news is Walmart has one week to fix it…. or get closed. Which of course makes me happy.

They somehow passed the inspection yesterday… at least as far as the infestation goes and now they are in trouble because the roof is falling in and has tons of holes in it.

Nothing makes me feel better about shopping then having to avoid tripping over buckets every other isle that catch the water coming in from the roof.

Again… my Walmart is the win…. oh wait… teh fail. My bad.

Don’t post a comment telling me to stop shopping at this local Walmart because I already have. I know I should have a long time ago but getting Tiffany to stop… it hasn’t been easy. Even after I got escorted out for shopping “after curfew”.

I’ve been dual-booting between Linux Mint and Windows Vista on all of my machines for a while now trying to make the adjustment to using Linux full-time.

I still find myself switching between the operating systems often. For somethings Linux works best, for others I still have to come back to Windows.

Linux is a “your mileage may vary” kind of operating system.

Choice is great. I have a great deal of choices in Linux… but sometimes I have so many that it just ruins the experience for me.

A good example is how applications are installed on various distros.

For most you actually have to compile the files before you install them. I’ve actually found myself getting pretty acquainted with the process and it isn’t terribly hard but can my fiancee or my mom do it? Certainly not.

I know that the great part about Linux is that we have choice… however this is part of the problem. With so many choices no one can decide on a standard for installing applications on Linux that the regular average computer user can sit down and do.

RPMs, DEBS, these are things that the average user just doesn’t understand… nor do they want to.

So what can the people pushing Linux truly do?

Honestly I’m not sure. Getting people to agree on anything in the Linux community is going to be about damn near impossible.

My experience with the community is another “milage may vary” sort of topic. Sometimes I’ll ask for some assistance and people are quick to jump up and either give me the answer I need or at the very least point me in the right direction of a tutorial that I couldn’t find even after a great deal of searching.

Othertimes they can all be egotistical assholes. They believe they are better then everyone else because they use an “alternative” operating system. Sure buddy… that makes you so much “cooler”.

I’ve found that someone like my fiancee or my mother won’t have much luck finding help all of the time for issues they may have. If I decided to set either of them up with a Linux system I would myself have to become more familiar with the innerworkings so they have someone that can help them.

Linux has been great in the productivity department for me. I have found a plethora of great programs that keep me productive on Linux and it truly shows that Linux is becoming ready for the business and educational enviroment. As far as entertainment goes I’ve found the choices to be lacking.

A great deal of music and video software exists for Linux but not each program does everything and it often times takes me two programs to do things that one simple program on Windows could do but I’ve noticed that in this area a new program for Linux comes out nearly all of the time and that the developers are dedicated to making software that does everything I want.

Gaming on Linux has also been suprisingly pleasant. I’m playing World of Warcraft on my Linux box through Wine and I must say the experience has been VERY positive for me. I thought the game would run slow, the framerate would be bad or I’d run in to a lot of problems. Everyone makes installing it out to be some huge nightmare but I honestly had ZERO real problems getting it up and running on my Linux box.

As a matter of fact I’ve found that World of Warcraft not only LOOKS better on my Linux box then it does on Windows I get a much higher framerate then what I’ve been getting on Windows Vista.

I can run World of Warcraft at a higher graphics setting in Linux then I could on Windows and it looks better! I still can’t get over that.

With more and more software becoming avaliable each day I find myself pulled more and more to Linux because my system is more secure, seems a whole hell of a lot snappier, and most everything for Linux can be had for no charge.

Once the community learns to be more accepting of the new Linux users, some standards are established, and some more companies like Dell start offering Linux preinstalled you will see more and more people switching over to Linux.

P.S

The Linux Mint community has been the most pleasant community in the Linux world to date. When other distro communities were mean, hateful, and full of themselves the people in the Linux Mint community were understanding, thoughtful, and nice.

Tiffany and I are trying to spend more time together this weekend then we have in the past.

So we decided to play World of Warcraft together. I moved my computer to another desk and she moved her laptop to a spot on the same desk and we rerolled new characters on a PVP server.

Last night we both played until level 8 before we decided to watch some television and then hit the bed to get rested up for another fun-filled and exciting day.

I’ll be sure to post more on our status as we keep playing

So begins my journey…

The install has completed, the patching is nearly finished.

I must say that I’m VERY excited.

I installed Linux Mint on my computer and am dual-booting between it and Windows Vista.

If I can make World of Warcraft run on Linux properly then I will use it a lot more in my day-to-day computing.

The installer is downloading the files I need right now

Recently I wrote about quitting World of Warcraft and how I didn’t really miss it. I even listed several reasons as to why I left the game. I didn’t include everything on that list but I still wrote a lot of them down.

One reason I left is because I was on the Alexstraza server. When I first started playing the game it was where my friends were (namely Jim).

Over time Alexstraza has become known as a server full of drama, problems, glitches and slow overcrowding.

One reason I left the game was because I was sick to death of waiting in a que, having to wait hours for Alterac Valley and the general childish drama of the server.

this week Blizzard opened a new server. This week I resubscribed to the game and moved ALL of my characters to said new server and decided to give the game another go.

Imust say I’m impressed. Not having to deal with the same stupid childish antics (yet), being able to get in to Alterac Valley with only ten minute ques, and not watching trade channel be spammed every two seconds is a nice change.

Will this bring me back to the game forever?

Maybe… not likely as I still have a great deal of issues with the game… but will it get me playing again for a while? Most certainly.

Besides with Age of Conan now being pushed back until May what am I suppose to play?

I cancelled my World of Warcraft account recently.

As of right now I’ve already found that I have more time dedicated to getting things done, posting on my blog more often, talking with friends a bit more and surfing the news on the Internet.

Do I miss it?

I can’t really say that I miss it. I have noticed though that on ocassions I find myself thinking it would be alright to login and start grinding for some gold.

The more I thought about that though the more I realized that grinding is one of the reasons I left.

Upon further thought I also realized that it is highly likely I may join the world again when the next expansion pack comes out.

My logic here is rather simple.

When Wrath of the Lich King comes out the value of everything in Northend will be higher and the game economy will again for a while inflate.

As such I should be able to make a large amount of gold by simply questing and doing things that I’m already going to need to do to begin with.

I’m not addicted to World of Warcraft, I’m not counting down the days until the next expansion pack either. I am interested though on how it will play out and how good of a game it will be.

Age of Conan though… I am counting down for that one

I’ve been a pretty loyal World of Warcraft player for some time now as many around me already know.

Earlier this week as evidenced in this post you saw that I decided to cancel my account.

I left because…

• I hate que times.
  Sure the ques are only about fifteen minutes or so now. I realize they used to be much longer and used to happen more often but my new busy schedule prevents me from giving World of Warcraft long periods of playing. Fifteen minutes is 1/4 of my play time spent waiting to get in the game. I can simply play other games without a que and get my fix of fun gaming elsewhere.
• I hate Blizzard’s customer is wrong approach.
  The moderators on the forums will often belittle players, take sides, and post statements that if another company made them to a customer base or called a customer stupid would be totally unacceptable. For Blizzard though it seems acceptable.
• Childish Antics.
  Something about World of Warcraft sure does attract the drama filled children. I’m waiting for Age of Conan a truly adult game to finally be released. I’m sure the kids will come eventually but I’m holding out hope they won’t be like the children in World of Warcraft.
• Alterac Valley.
  Why does Blizzard insist that Horde players now have the upper-hand in Alterac Valley when the Alliance clearly has an amazing chokepoint. Why should I suffer through two hour que times to play my favorite battleground because the Alliance gets beaten and won’t que for it until the Horde lets them win some.
• Battleground AFKers.
  I realize they are now taking action against people who are AFK a great deal but this like other solutions will slowly be used less and less often.
• Boredom.
  The game hasn’t really changed all that much. Sure we’ve got Black Temple in the game, Sunwell coming in the game, and more but at the moment nothing revolutionary is happening in World of Warcraft. Blizzard take some ideas from other MMORPGS that are coming out this year and start adding new features to attract players back.

I may only be one player to quit in 9 million players but I’ll take my money and spend it on the Age of Conan Collectors Edition where I can experience a truly adult game, better PVP, player built cities, new classes, and a whole new story line.

I don’t do New Years Resolutions.

I have made the following commitments to 2008 though.

1. To not blog once each daily, weekly, or monthly but to blog when I feel I have something to share or say. I don’t want to post crap each day just because I said I’d post every single day.
2. With that thought in mind I do promise to give my blog some much needed attention though.
3. To quit smoking once and for all.
4. To make at least five new close friends this year.
5. To play Age of Conan to the maximum level.
6. To stop playing World of Warcraft as much.
7. To reach the maximum level in Mythos before the next beta server wipe.
8. To drop at least ten pounds.