A few career anniversaries in the next month…
7 minute read
March 23, 2017, 2:04 AM
The next month contains no less than three career anniversaries of mine. March 31 marks ten years since I was fired from Walmart, April 15 marks the 15th anniversary of when CFW Information Services (then Telegate USA) closed and I was laid off, and then April 18 marks ten years from the day that I was hired at Food & Water Watch. Rememberances of jobs past, I suppose.
The anniversary that still gets me is the CFW one. I can’t believe that it’s been fifteen years. That was my first job, which I started at age 16, in June 1997. It was a call center job, processing inbound calls for customers seeking directory assistance services in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, DC, Delaware, and New Jersey. Then Pennsylvania got added to the mix. Then we started doing two national services – one used by bill collectors doing skiptracing, and a wholesale service for the public through a variety of different providers. When the national services came online, I mostly did the bill collector service. That was a good job. The dress code was casual (after all, who saw you?) and you worked at a computer all day.
That job did, however, have a turning point. In June 2000, parent company CFW Communications made a major change to its corporate structure, merging with another regional telecommunications company in Virginia to form nTelos. As part of that same deal, Information Services was out. Our division would not become part of the new nTelos, as we were sold to Telegate, a company based in Munich, Germany. I remember watching this company, which had thrived under CFW ownership, be slowly destroyed under Telegate ownership. If I recall, Telegate acquired our company with the intention of gaining a foothold in the US marketplace, with the desire to eventually launch a “11880” style service in the US like they did in Germany. The “11880” style service never happened, and things basically stayed the same. Meanwhile, for a company with three Virginia call centers (Clifton Forge, Waynesboro, and Winchester), their choice of a headquarters location was surprising: Plano, Texas. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The management in Texas also seemed to come and go on a fairly regular basis, as one after the other either abruptly quit or was dismissed. It was no surprise when Telegate started closing call centers as the business started to drop off (probably due to the hideous management of the company), as Clifton Forge, Waynesboro, and Winchester all closed within about 6-7 months of each other. I was away at college at the time that my center closed, and never received any official notification from Telegate of the center’s closing, but rather, was notified by some of my soon-to-be-former coworkers. It just so happened that I would be in town the weekend before the closing, and so I stopped by to pick up my belongings and turn in my equipment. And that was the end of my first job.
Continue reading…Saying goodbye to Landmark Mall…
5 minute read
February 23, 2017, 9:21 AM
About a month ago, Elyse, Brian, Aaron, and I took a field trip to Landmark Mall in Alexandria, visiting it for the last time. Landmark was slated to close permanently on January 31, and so we came by to get photos before it all shut down. This trip took a similar form to when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall in September 2015, though in the case of Owings Mills, we didn’t know that in less than two weeks from our visit, the mall would close permanently. With Landmark, the mall was closing at the end of January in preparation for a redevelopment that would replace the mall with a mixed-use “town center” style development. The Macy’s and Sears stores would remain through the redevelopment, however, I suspect that may change. The Landmark Macy’s was included in the round of store closings that Macy’s was doing in early 2017, and I’d suggest that the long-term prospects for Sears’ survival are looking pretty grim, so the plan to include those two buildings in the new development might change, as one of those stores is vacating, and the second may not be far behind.
And then here are photos:
Escalators in the mall’s northeast corner, viewed from the lower level.
Categories: Alexandria, Elyse, Friends, Retail
In retail, it’s made abundantly clear that the employee is never right…
7 minute read
August 16, 2016, 8:12 PM
The recent discussion in this space about bad employee behavior made me think of a few incidents that occurred during my time at Walmart back in 2004 that defied logic. These were incidents where I got pulled into the back office and chewed out for something that I had no control over due to policies and procedures in place at the time. One of these even was handled as a “coaching”, short for “Coaching for Improvement”, which is Walmart’s term for its disciplinary process. If you ask me, it’s pretty messed up to discipline someone over something that they have no control over. It’s where you realize that as an employee, you are never right, even when you follow protocol to the letter, and you are also responsible for your managers’ mistakes.
The first incident occurred in the summer of 2004. I got into work, and my boss, the assistant manager over the front end, pulled me aside to speak with me as soon as I clocked in. His first words were, “This is your verbal warning,” i.e. this was a coaching. Lovely. I was then told that they had caught me on camera at the service desk accepting a stolen item for a return. They explained what happened, i.e. that a person had taken a vacuum cleaner off of the shelf, walked it over to the service desk, presented a receipt, and got a their money back for it from me.
While at first glance it might seem like an open-and-shut case, and therefore grounds to discipline me for accepting a stolen item for a return, if you look more deeply into it, that argument starts to fall apart. My job at the service desk was to accept and process returns. In my store, a mid-2000s Supercenter, the service desk was in the middle of the front end, in a space that I referred to as a cave, since it was a windowless room that was only open to the rest of the store on one side.
I always thought that an important rule of retail was not to get into arguments with your customers…
6 minute read
August 2, 2016, 12:32 PM
Do you ever have those days where some people’s behaviors defy logic? Such is what happened to me at the Giant Food store in Leisure World yesterday. Generally speaking, if someone is handing you money, it’s generally not a good idea to start arguing with them over something minor to the point of losing the sale. It was one of those occasions where I was bothered enough by the treatment to write the company about it. This is what I wrote:
While I was shopping at the Leisure World Giant store, I was very surprised about the treatment that I received from an employee wearing a purple shirt named Ken. I was buying a single item, and, after seeing an older woman go through the Solution Center for checkout with a single item, I followed suit. I was very surprised to hear Ken absolutely refuse to check me out for my one item, citing a policy, for which I was unable to locate signage anywhere in the store, that you can’t check out at the solution center. Ken then proceeded to argue with me over this alleged policy, when it would have taken less time to not argue and just complete the sale. The store ultimately lost the sale on account of Ken, as the item was not worth getting into an argument over. Even more surprising was that, with the checkout lines backed up into the aisle, the solution center does not help relieve the pressure on the regular checkouts when they are backed up, such as was the case today. I have always praised Giant in the past for its level of good customer service, which is generally higher than its peers in the market. I hope that this sort of behavior, with employees who get into arguments with customers over extremely minor things, is not a “new normal” for Giant.
Categories: Giant Food, Retail, Some people
Nobody can rope a wheel like I can…
6 minute read
July 30, 2016, 10:52 AM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I went up to Harrisburg with another friend to help test drive a bus. My friend had been searching for a bus to convert into an RV, and located a school bus as a potential candidate. I was there because I had a CDL, and therefore could legally drive the bus, and knew what I was talking about when it came to looking the bus over and getting a feel for how it drove. Considering that my work as of late has had me around rail vehicles rather than buses, I was excited, because I hadn’t driven a bus since April.
The bus was a 2007 Thomas Built HDX. For those not familiar, that is a transit-style school bus, i.e. the kind with a flat front. I definitely knew how to drive those, because transit buses have flat fronts, plus I first learned how to drive a bus on a Thomas Built MVP, which is an older version of this bus. Only thing I did have to get used to with this bus was that the turn signal control was on the steering column, whereas on a transit bus, the turn signals are on the floor. School buses should have them on the floor as well, for the same reason that they’re on the floor for transit: it allows you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times. Clearly, whoever placed the stalk for the turn signals had never operated a bus before, because it did feel like something of an awkward reach to operate the turn signal.
I was worried that I might have lost some of my bus-handling skill in the three months that had passed since the last time I had operated a bus, but once I got a feel for the bus, no problem. As I discovered after being out for six weeks for that broken foot, it’s just like riding a bike. However, I did have to get used to the pedals on this bus. Unlike every other bus that I had driven, where the accelerator and the brake pedals are attached to the floor, these were hung from above, like a car. Go figure. But once I got over that, no problem.
Categories: Driving, Elyse, Friends, Harrisburg, Walmart
New couch!
9 minute read
May 29, 2016, 6:30 PM
Sometimes, you just have to go out with the old. After fifteen years, I finally got rid of my old futon from college. In other words, this:
The only constant is change…
8 minute read
April 5, 2016, 6:06 PM
On March 30 and 31, I went on a road trip down to Stuarts Draft with Elyse, where I showed her a whole bunch of stuff. I showed her the mountain, we visited my ex-store, we went to Staunton Mall, and we saw JMU. All in all, a fun trip. The lesson to be learned from this trip, however, is that change is inevitable, as many things that I had hoped to show Elyse had changed, and other things were going to change.
Coming down from Maryland via US 29, we visited Afton Mountain. I have photographed this area many, many, many times before. So I more or less know what’s there. I did spot a few new things in the process of going about things, like this vintage television:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Elyse, Family, Fire alarms, Stuarts Draft, Urban exploration, Walmart, Waynesboro
Getting a “big boy” camera…
6 minute read
January 20, 2016, 1:44 PM
Last Thursday was a lot of fun. I got together with Elyse, with the intent of getting some sample material to evaluate for the future purchase of a new camera. This new camera will be a digital SLR, as I am quite confident that I have outgrown the “prosumer” level of camera that I have operated on since Big Mavica in 2002. I discovered that in 2014 when I photographed Brighton Dam and Triadelphia Reservoir with a borrowed Nikon Coolpix P510. The photos with that camera came out well enough, but other than a few extra pixels because of the higher resolution on that camera, I didn’t get any better features than my existing camera.
But first, after Elyse and I got together, we had lunch at Jimmy John’s. I had a sandwich, and Elyse just had one of the day-old rolls that they sell:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Food and drink, Maryland, Retail
I feel like I was shooting the photos for those motivational posters…
4 minute read
October 25, 2015, 11:12 PM
This past Thursday, I went up to High Rock, which is a rock outcropping on South Mountain in Pen Mar, Maryland, in Washington County near the Pennsylvania border. It reminds me a little bit of both Humpback Rock in Virginia, and the Aqueduct Bridge stub in DC. Like Humpback Rock, it’s high on a mountaintop, however, unlike Humpback Rock, you can drive up to it and park right next to it, rather than parking down below and then hiking a mile straight uphill. Like the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s covered in graffiti and a popular overlook point, but unlike the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s a natural feature rather than manmade. I went up there with the intent of scouting out the location for a potential future set for the Photography section on Schumin Web. I knew it had a view, but I wasn’t so sure about it. I arrived just before 5:00 PM, and stayed for about an hour and a half. While there, I let my curiosity lead the way, as I checked things out at the site and just kind of followed what I found interesting. I don’t know which intrigued me more: the formation itself, the view, or the graffiti.
So here’s what some of the take from this outing looked like:
View from High Rock facing approximately north, towards Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. The bit of stone in the foreground is actually manmade. As much as I can tell, this is some of what remains of an observatory that once stood at this site.
Categories: Maryland, Photography, Walmart, Waynesboro (PA)
Hello… Roanoke?
4 minute read
September 16, 2015, 5:46 PM
This past Friday, I was out with my friend Elyse checking out a few interesting shopping centers in the Baltimore area. We weren’t so much interested in shopping as we were in seeing the centers themselves, and their various eccentricities. We first visited Owings Mills Mall, which is a large. two-story facility in Owings Mills, Maryland that contains only six tenants: Bath & Body Works, DTLR, Gymboree, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Victoria’s Secret. Needless to say, this was a dead mall. Then we visited the Centre at Glen Burnie, which is a small and well-hidden single-level indoor mall off of Route 2 in Glen Burnie. This was no dead mall by any means, but its being an enclosed mall surprised me. I’d been by this shopping center many times in the past, and shopped at the Target store there, and never would have guessed that this was an enclosed mall. Then our third and final mall was Security Square, a mid-sized single-level mall in Woodlawn. Security Square was interesting for its former JCPenney building, which, after Penney’s closed, was converted to “Seoul Plaza”, a mall-within-a-mall consisting mostly of Korean businesses, though now approaching dead mall status (though the rest of the mall is doing well).
However, the biggest surprise of the day came as Elyse and I were walking through the Sears wing of Security Square. Does this remind you of anywhere in particular?
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Retail
“Not fooling anybody” in DC…
10 minute read
October 31, 2014, 11:50 AM
This past Saturday, I did some photography in Washington DC, but not the usual sort of photography that I do when I head into DC. This time, I photographed repurposed commercial buildings, i.e. buildings constructed with the standard architecture for a specific chain, and now operated by a business other than the one that the architecture would suggest. “Not Fooling Anybody” on Reddit, where people share photos of such conversions, describes it as “former chain businesses that have been converted to other uses, yet still strongly resemble their former use.” Some people might call these bad conversions, but I prefer to call them “obvious conversions”. After all, some conversions can look quite elegant, such as Italiano’s in Baltimore, which is a former KFC, but nonetheless still resemble the former tenant’s distinctive style.
It’s also worth noting that these sorts of buildings have no historical value of any kind, so they’re worth photographing while they’re still there, because they will be demolished when someone comes up with a more lucrative use for the land.
For this trip, I did my research. I had assembled a list of some places that I had spotted over the course of going wherever over the years, and then augmented that with some others that the folks on the DC subreddit brought to my attention, particularly on some corridors that I had never had any reason to travel under normal circumstances, such as Bladensburg Road and Benning Road. I then used Google Street View to visually verify all of the suggestions so that I knew what to look for in the field, plus I also did a virtual drive down a few roads using Street View to see if there were any others, as some corridors tend to be just teeming with them.
Categories: Converted buildings, Maryland, Netculture, Washington DC
So I found an app that lets you take stereo photos…
8 minute read
July 16, 2014, 10:24 PM
Last night, I found an app called 3D Camera for my Android phone. The idea behind the app is that you take two photos a few inches apart from each other, you line them up, and then the app makes a stereo image for you to look at. Depending on how you shoot them, they can come out as either crossview or parallel. I tested it out late last night on a Wheelock 7002T, and came up with this:
(By the way, I strongly recommend clicking each of the images on this entry to view them at full size in the lightbox)
Categories: Photography, Reddit, Retail, Rockville
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
14 minute read
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.
Categories: Arundel Mills, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Companies, Converted buildings, Driving, Howard County, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Reddit, Sheetz, Vintage business, Westminster
Sometimes you have those weekends where you just have to get out of the house…
12 minute read
June 11, 2014, 6:06 PM
Ever get that feeling of “I just have to get out of the house”? I recently had that feeling, where I just needed a change of scenery for a little bit, and so I planned a weekend trip down to Stuarts Draft to visit the parents, going down Friday, and coming back Sunday. They were, as always, delighted to see me, and on the whole, we had a good time. I also made some extra space in my house, as, on Mom’s request, I brought my sister’s old bicycle back to my parents’ house. Gave me some practice in “beheading” a bicycle by removing the front wheel, and then reattaching it at my destination. But it travels much more easily without the front wheel:
The freshly-liberated front wheel.
Categories: Bicycle, Companies, Driving, Family, Fire drills, Harrisonburg, Middle school, Reddit, Stuarts Draft, Walmart, Waynesboro, Weather
The mildly interesting things that you see in a day…
5 minute read
March 21, 2014, 11:34 PM
So my Friday was fun. I got together with my friend Matthew, we did some cooking, and then after Matthew and I parted company for the day, I headed over to Dulles Town Center for a bit. Over the course of the day, I spotted a few things that I found mildly interesting.
On the way in, I stopped over at Aardvark Swim in Chantilly. I usually go to the Rockville location, but since they were out of goggle straps (the bungee cord kind) in Rockville, and I knew I was going to be out this way sooner than Rockville would get more in stock, I swung by and here to get them. Those of you who follow me on Instagram may remember that I was contemplating whether or not to buy this:
Categories: Clothing, Fire alarms, Food and drink, Matthew, Retail