monkey nonsense

having worked at k-mart for about a month (i found another job doing computer maintenance stuff soon after… the worst mistake of my life as it lead me down the path i am currently on) and the IT industry for about a year and a half now… i think a comparison is in order…

	K-Mart	IT Industry
pay	$6.50 a hour	substantially more than $6.50/hr
benefits	i’m sure they offer 401k and insurance (as i was a teenager while employed there, i didn’t really pay attention), but most importantly… they gave you your birthday off	401k, insurance, paid sick leave, 3 weeks vacation, floating holidays (take off on your birthday), and i’m sure a bunch more
interest	new customers nearly every day, new stories to hear. little kids, teenagers, adults, the elderly… you get the whole spectrum. seeing what people purchase… what kind of crap people try to pull off (“it was on the clearance rack under a sign for $0.99″…. “sorry ma’am, but i think someone misplaced this VHS/DVD/MP3/all-everything gadget on the clearance rack, it’s ringing up for $100″)	the same freaking thing over and over and over (and over) again
challenge	so back in the day, when i worked at k-mart, they had ghetto registers that didn’t allow you to ring up multiple quantities, you just had to scan them in individually. also ghetto? the scanners, they would usually work, but some times they wouldn’t. one day, my scanner was broken. so i spent the whole day hand-entering each UPC barcode on each item. my customers were very understanding when i explained what was wrong. many of them gave me sympathetic looks as i tried to process their purchases as fast as possible. and then…. came the cat lady…. with 185193859183919 cans of cat food! so with no quantity button and working scanner, i handtyped the barcode for each of those cans (ok ok, it was more like 50 cans)… the customer was very understanding, even the people waiting behind her were very patient.	the reason why i bring up the “cat food incident” is because although you would think the IT industry would be more challenging… it is indeed NOT! just like at k-mart, it’s a lot of mindless button pushing! unlike k-mart, where you’ll rarely have to actually type the same numbers over and over again (unless you run into a lady with 50 cans of cat food, no quantity button and working scanner… which btw, won’t happen now because i noticed they got new scanners and computers at k-mart and one time, the cashier rang up multiple items for me with a quantity button!) and where you get to have a cool scanner that makes beep sounds as things are rung up, the button pushing in the IT industry rarely varies… it’s the same buttons over and over (and over!) again
future prospects	so K-mart’s filed for bankruptcy multiple times… so that doesn’t bode well. there are other similar stores to choose from. overall, the retail industry is very volatile (always depends on how the economy is doing) but they always need cashiers. the problem though is that there are always people that can do the job…	i think the future is marginally better for the IT industry… though i’m hesitant to say that for sure. granted they always seem to be hiring and it’s a thriving industry, there was also the dot com burst a couple of years ago that slowed down all computer-related business… there’s also that pesky outsourcing business!
ethics	martha stewart?	worldcom accounting scandal? enron?? (ok, so enron’s not really IT, but it’s corporate!)

i still think K-Mart was one of the best jobs i ever had…. so if you’re looking for a job that pays well and offers little challenge (basically, my dream job out of college! trust me… it’s not worth it ), try the IT industry! if you’re looking for a job that will be interesting every day and money is not an issue (bah! i wish ), try K-Mart!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 4:47 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.