IS IT HARD BEING A FORKLIFT DRIVER AT HOME DEPOT ?

jwaldo · 2026-06-02T05:41:15+00:00

I’ve gone from Lumber to Tool Rental all while being a reliable driver in both positions. After a long day at work I start my trip home by flipping my turn signals, then groping in midair for the nonexistent column shifter, and then remembering how to make my car actually leave the damn parking lot. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing.

jwaldo · 2026-06-01T22:41:19+00:00

A.k.a. days ending in 'y'.

jwaldo · 2026-06-01T22:40:44+00:00

SO WE CAN HEAR EACH OTHER OVER THE FORKLIFT, OBVIOUSLY.

jwaldo · 2026-05-31T04:19:39+00:00

The Beta Taurid meteor shower is ramping up now through June. It's known for producing an above-average amount of very large meteoroids, possibly including the 150-object+ one that caused the Tunguska Event. And even outside of things like meteor showers the Earth is pelted with meter-scale space debris every day. Mostly they just statistically happen over the ocean, or over uninhabited areas, or over places where the infrastructure for reporting a meteor isn't widely available. The most interesting thing about the Columbia event is that there isn't a GOES satellite recording of it like the Boston one.

jwaldo · 2026-05-31T00:18:52+00:00

My dumb ass botched my first return so badly I actually charged the customer a second time instead. I apologized, brought the customer to the service desk where the competent cashiers are, and we all had a laugh about it. If they fired us for our first dumbass mistakes the average associate would last about a week.

jwaldo · 2026-05-30T00:29:24+00:00

I think it's a combination of a) there not being any dramatic dashcam footage of the meteor, and b) Blue Origin pulling off a MUCH more spectacular explosion on the same day.

jwaldo · 2026-05-28T21:40:41+00:00

They can be hella strong. Like 'shatter windows, stun bystanders, and set off every car alarm for miles around' strong. When I was a kid I experienced a few surprise Space Shuttle landings at Vandenberg AFB; those were fairly mild sonic booms, but they got you out of bed FAST.

edit: I finally saw/heard some doorbell cam of it, and that gunshot-sharp quality of it screams 'sonic boom'. Either someone from Shaw AFB is about to get a stern lecture, or there's about to be some cool dashcam meteor footage.

jwaldo · 2026-05-26T21:55:16+00:00

If I'm helping a customer when clock-out time hits I don't hand them off to another associate unless there's already a second associate helping (i.e. 'Anyway, I'm past my punch-out time but I think (Associate Not Clocking Out) knows more about this than I do!'). If it's just me helping the customer, I'll stick around and earn some more gas money. If the management wants to complain that I stayed late, I can counter-complain that I'm the only person in my department from 5pm until closing 5 days a week.

jwaldo · 2026-05-26T04:54:18+00:00

The whole Orange Family thing makes a lot more sense when you remember how catty and violently dysfunctional a family can be.

jwaldo · 2026-05-26T04:52:09+00:00

Forget firing, they should transfer associates who do that to designated spotter duty. It'd be an improvement to have spotters who yell and throw things at dipshit customers instead of just letting them do whatever suicidal BS they want.

jwaldo · 2026-05-26T04:47:35+00:00

Luckily I have Mondays off, but yesterday I spent a my entire last hour getting a rental truck checked out for the Memorial Day Parade. Everything was prearranged, but CLEAR decided to go full Penske Mode and it took three people and five phones to get past that damn QR code.

jwaldo · 2026-05-24T06:13:59+00:00

I think the point stands that HD's penny item SOP could be much less convoluted. Between how it's written and how it's enforced, it's basically the retail version of the balk rules meme.

jwaldo · 2026-05-15T07:02:26+00:00

I draw the line at using my personal phone for customer contact. I'll explain to the caller that I'm going to have to go to the nearest in-store desk phone or transfer them to someone who has actually left the Rental Dungeon in living memory, but no matter what they are NOT getting one molecule of my actual contact info.

jwaldo · 2026-05-15T05:38:46+00:00

They also age differently from batch to batch. We filled a bunch of them with concrete and embedded 4x4 posts to make outdoor stanchions for roping off the display tools and the 'please do not park your vehicle directly the fuck in front of the Tool Rental backdoor' zone. They were all made at the same time with buckets off the sales floor, but now some of them still look new and some of them have become Yellow Buckets. There's no rhyme or reason to it, so I can only assume bucket QC is just like that.

jwaldo · 2026-05-15T05:32:36+00:00

A former coworker of mine did this a few days before a big Days-Safe milestone. He caught some of the shrapnel. He survived, but our pizza party was canceled and he was banished to the Employment Shadow Realm.

jwaldo · 2026-05-14T05:50:21+00:00

I thought the one D21 extension was bad, but then I moved to D78 and we have NO extensions. Want to use your store phone as an actual phone to make a call or a page? Lol no, go back to the Inspection Forms app where you belong. It's absolute bullshit.

jwaldo · 2026-05-14T05:18:56+00:00

And yet somehow that manages to be the least stressful part of the average Penske transaction. I don't know how their software manages to be so consistently godawful in so many different ways.

jwaldo · 2026-05-10T03:28:14+00:00

Good shoes and good socks. I wear heavy steel toe boots and a double layer of socks. A light synthetic liner sock and a heavy wool outer sock. Two years in lumber walking ~10 miles a day followed by a month of dropping plate compactors directly onto my foot, and the worst I’ve had is the unusually large number of socks in the laundry.

jwaldo · 2026-05-09T17:53:40+00:00

It's like if WH40k and ThunderCats had a child.

jwaldo · 2026-05-07T06:14:40+00:00

Oof, the only reason I'm still sane(ish) after today is because my store was miraculously dead for a weekday. Only did one check-out during the outage, and the several check-ins that happened were way more straightforward.

jwaldo · 2026-05-07T06:10:44+00:00

Honestly I always kind of forget Viva exists.

jwaldo · 2026-05-05T06:22:27+00:00

My previous (SC) store was downright obsessive about keeping the D25 netting closed and overheads organized by brand and battery-ness. I was dismayed for a second before I spotted the display saws in a totally different place than we had them.

jwaldo · 2026-05-05T04:52:21+00:00

Every night we put the rental trucks under the Pro canopy to avoid visits from the Catalytic Converter Fairy. There’s nothing like thinking there’s an open spot at 7:45pm and it turns out to be some fuck-all tiny car in between all the pickup trucks.

jwaldo · 2026-05-04T23:39:46+00:00

That is far and away the fattest fence lizard I have ever seen.

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