Bike horns and pet toys

[AccountingDrone]

I saw some kid setting all the alarms on all the cheap digital watches on display at the local Walmart.

No one bothered to stop him and even the "try not to be obvious but fail miserably" loss prevention people were not anywhere near the area. So he had all the time in the world to set up his nefarious plan.

He set them to go off 5 minutes apart from each other. There were over 100 watches in that display.

Even worse was that the next day I had to go back for something else and they went off again at the same time as the day before. When I left they were pulling staff to turn off all the watches.

A couple wage slaves and I worked at a Service Merchandise one Christmas season back in the dark ages. Back in the warehouse was a great job for someone still in college and just wanting a bit of extra Christmas present money and a store shopping discount The assistant manager was sexually abusive, he hit on all of us, and you had to be sure not to be stuck alone with him in a small confined space because he would go in for a grope. I know that I put up with his abuse for almost a month - I stuck with it mainly because I took the job and I don't back out of jobs easily. The other 2 warehouse girls and I quit when we found out he was promoted to store manager when the nice manager left to manage a different store over in Buffalo. The old good manager more or less kept the idiot in line and made sure that he wasn't the closing AM when the WH was staffed only by women. Our revenge on the jackass was to hide alarm clocks in the warehouse set to go off at all sorts of different times overnight. The one I hid was actually up on the top of a beam and wrapped in bubble wrap so that it was just loud enough to set off the alarm, and had an automatic cutoff after 5 minutes. It would go off, set off the building glassbreaks and then quietly turn itself off. From a guy I was sort of dating at the time, it took them almost a week of having someone in the warehouse actively looking for it overnight to find it. It took me the cherry picker and moving a set of shelving to get the picker over to the spot to put it up there

[DeltaSierra]

The same can be said of those dancing/singing toys around the holidays, especially at Christmas. I know I wanted to kill customers and especially employees that would hit buttons on ten different toys and then just walk away. It's cute the first time, not when it happens a hundred times in a single shift.

And yet strangely, I'm drawn to the damn things and will hit a bunch of buttons before I realize what I'm doing and slink away. Sorry employees (especially Hallmark!)

Heck how about the ones that are activated by motion sensor and go off when you simply walk by them? There was one that was a 7' grim reaper at one of the grocery stores nearby, and the first time that thing started moving after I had walked past it, I almost had a heart attack!!!!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Several Christmases ago, one of the swamp's buyers, whom I sincerely hope is now either emptying dumpsters or eating out of them, decided we should be THE go-to store for annoying, singing, dancing toys and chotchkies.

We had them all. The big-mouth Billy bass. The pickup truck with a deer strapped to the hood and two hunters inside. The hunter or fisherman with a big fish or deer on his back forcing him to sing and dance. There were others I don't recall. They arrived in huge quantities, and were placed together in a single section that we employees steered clear of because it attracted every mouth-breathing yahoo in town that enjoyed playing with them and setting them all off at once to make an ear-splitting racket, and then walked away and didn't buy any.

And then after Christmas was over there was still a glut of these damn things at the DC, so they sent us more because a proven fact that we sell clearance items at a much higher rate than other stores do.

There was also Buck (I think that was his name), which was a stuffed-and-mounted deer head on a plaque that told bad jokes when you pushed a button. Or something. Corporate had high high hopes for this thing. They sent down a memo instructing us to clear off a front endstand in sporting good RIGHT NAO so Buck could be prominently displayed on it. The memo also mentioned, with great enthusiasm, that a couple stores in our district managed to sell one or two of them, so they felt people would be tearing the doors off their hinges to buy Buck the talking deer head.

We didn't sell a single one until they went on clearance and got marked down a couple times, and probably ended up sending some back once they hit their out of stock date.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Not too long after the family left, the father came back in and ended up buying the toy.

Looks like the kid out-SCed his patents.

[MoonCat]

A few years ago there was a warehouse fire here. Guess what burned? Somebody's entire stock of singing Christmas trees.

The best Christmas EVER.

[NotAlBundy]

I have to admit, I love the "Douglas Fir" singing Christmas tree and asked for it as a gift several years ago. However, my apartment is pretty tiny and I don't really decorate for any holidays, so he is stuffed away in a closet somewhere.

[emax4]

While working at Guitar Center, I tested the Ops manager's sense of humor, which was nil. Yamaha had this karaoke keyboard which had a microphone attached to it. Any kid knows that with a microphone, a speaker, and the "record" button on, you can make some funny howling noises.

I put the microphone above the keyboard in the right position, so when the ops manager came in and turned on the lights and appliances, you could hear this obnoxious howling sound.

[Merriweather]

We had them all. The big-mouth Billy bass.

I always laugh when I see one of those things, thinking of the first time I ever saw one. I had been living in the UK for almost a decade, then we came back to the US (absolute culture shock in lots of ways).

Not long after, I turned the TV on, and saw an ad for one of those things. It was one of those extra-long ads (not really an infomercial), and went on and on, this particular one even came with extra CDs of songs, and it went over all the things it sang. I honestly thought I had turned the TV to some sort of Saturday Night Life type of commercial parody. I kept waiting for the next skit. I really never imagined it was an honest to goodness item being advertised for sale. It just seemed way too ludicrous. Sigh.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Looks like the kid out-SCed his patents.

That's the thing. The parents, apart from that bit of suckiness (giving Screaming Kid a toy that they didn't intend to buy), were a very well-behaved family. No other Suck that I can recall.

But Screaming Kid just wore them down.