[CaptainCrunch]

I was there after I got finished with the military and college. I was making more money then my friends who had gotten jobs closer to their degrees, but I didn't care, it was easy to make money. Sell products, get over a 5% CSP and you were making great money.

The worst thing that happened to me was when I joined the manager training program. Suddenly I went from working 5 days a week to 6 days a week. I was flying to Edmonton for pointless meetings twice a month, and on top of that, when I was running the floor I wasn't making commission and I was working til midnight doing the closing.

It was a brutal boot camp environment, when you worked there you bought into the morning cheers and the process and saying the word "fantastic" a ton.

Boxing day was a highlight. My last boxing day I made about $2000.00. We bought in these super top secret all in one samsung computers with a 20 mb hdd and a mb of ram, They were beasts in those days. Each store got limited numbers and they were door crashers. They had 100.00 spiff on top of commission. I spent the night before calling my 10 best clients and told them I would meet them in front of the store at midnight and bring them coffee and donuts. And then I stacked them back in my corner of the store. They came right for them and I pumped 10 out the door in 10 minutes.

I was there when they went public and bought a bunch of shares and got my family in on it too. I was there when they went into the States and cockily proclaimed that they were going to kill the big boys with our low prices and excellent policies. I was there 6 months later when they got chased back across the borders clutching their spanked butts and proclaiming that they couldn't be competitive with the buying power and dirty tactics of the huge box movers. But we all saw the writing on the wall. We knew that the big boys were going to chase us back across the border and kill us for daring to infringe on their territory.

I spent 4 years with them, paid off my student loans and my parents for helping me with college. But with the good came the bad, working for that company destroyed every relationship that I was in because FutureShop at the time was jealous of anything that would take your time and focus away from them. I was pretty much an alcoholic because of the performance stress, and working with a lot of people that were more then happy to bury a knife in your back to steal your sales and make you look bad to management.

I'm sure they mellowed out later. I'm grateful in a way because it was the ultimate corporate and sales bootcamp, and I learned how to deal with people.

But you also learned to really resent and hate the customers that came into the store because believe it or not, most people are jerks.