Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

The Art of the Shuffle

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I've been torturing my morning customers lately.

The store has been creeping up my opening shifts over the past several months anyway, and now that S. is gone almost all of my shifts are openers. There are plenty of random freakos that shuffle in and out in the morning, but most of the people that come in at 7am are regulars.

To open the door at 7, I arrive at about 6:30. My rule is, if I'm hitting the door at 6:30 am, I can play whatever the fuck I want on the stereo to keep myself awake. Thus, the torture.

What keeps me awake is Aquarium, by Aqua. You may remember Aqua - they were a Danish-Norwegian technopop group that won both worldwide fame and my heart by pissing off Mattel with the song "Barbie Girl".

I honestly can't remember why I bought the entire CD. I know I wanted to use the song for something, but why didn't I just get the single? This would have been back in 97 or so when the song came out, and at the time I had a full-time job and actual disposable income, but still. Anyway, I used the song on a mix tape or something and then never really listened to the whole CD.

...Until I took this job. Shifts can become gulags of boredom without the CD player. My collection isn't exactly huge, so before long I was digging back through the pile.

And that's when I discovered that I loveAquarium. It's the very finest in Scandanavian synth-pop dance music. It's incredibly chipper, in a modern Abbaesque sort of way. Years ago, I went out a couple of times with a guy who had been to Sweden and he said you really couldn't understand Abba until you'd traveled through a Scandanavian winter. I think he meant that they need that level of perkiness to keep themselves awake and sane during those endless cold nights, and I can't help but think that Aqua was doing the same public service.

Whatever they did for the Swedes, it really cheers me up first thing in the morning. "Barbie Girl" is great, of course, but the one that has most won my heart is the first track, "Happy Boys & Girls". After an opening synthesizer blast, the opening lyrics go like this:

Be HAPPY!
(Come on, let's go get it on!)
Be HAPPY!
Be HAPPY!
(Come on, let's go get it on!)
Be HAPPY!

And it just keeps getting better.

There's also a delightfully baffling song called "Doctor Jones":

Doctor Jones, Jones, Calling Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones, Doctor Jones get up now!
(Wake up, now!)
(Female lead yodels like a cowgirl)

I don't know if it's the lyrics written by non-native speakers of English or simply the relentless throbbing disco beat, but I just can't get enough of it.

Or, more accurately, I can't open the store without it. I play it every time I open. The whole album. I can't help it - the morning just isn't complete without it. If I time it just right, I can hit "play" when I'm rounding the counter and the lead singer screams "Be HAPPY!" just as I open the door.

I am happy, but I know it's driving my customers crazy. The songs have been drilled into their brains so many times that some of them unconsciously sing or whistle along. But not in a good way. There tends to be a bit of eye-rolling when they hit the door. Straight guys hate it the most, of course. It's hard to shop for rugged, manly porn to high-pitched singing and bouncy synthesisers. I hope that both "Barbie Girl" and the underrated "For Once in Your Life, Be a Man" give them something to think about, but I doubt it.

I feel bad for them, but I can't stop. (Well, I mostly feel bad for them. A tiny, sadistic part of my brain that I can't quite get rid of sees their pain and laughs like Renfield at their torment. The only one I've actually apologized to is Mr. Gentle. He sheepishly admitted to enjoying it, solidifying his position as my favorite customer ever.)

When I first started at the store, we weren't allowed to play whole albums. Our old manager hated being subjected to one choice for an hour at a time, so he mandated filling the player with different stuff and shuffling.

I hated it at first, but then I really got into it. The challenge of creating really good shuffle is endlessly entertaining, and appreciated by all clerks, no matter what our musical tastes. For a while Casey and I were really into Bollywood soundtracks, and, really, anything that would make the customers look up at the speakers in an attempt to figure out what the hell we were playing. Casey eventually got his hands on some Mongolian throat-singing, which was a delight.

Roy Orbison, the Trainspotting soundtrack, Soul Couging, and any good New Wave collection used to be a favorite blend of mine, though Casey came up with the most elegantly simple mix: Belle & Sebastian and GWAR.

Constructing theme days were fun, but after a while we just got into trying to crack each other up. Someone found a Stryper CD in a bargain bin somewhere and it was in the player for about three solid weeks.

But, as I said, I pull fewer and fewer night shifts and there's a high turnover - now that mini culture is gone and we're back to throwing stuff in to suit ourselves.

If my CDs send a message, it is, generally, "Be HAPPY!" That's because I'm sort of over it. Most CDs that we play - and I am occasionally still guilty of this - send this message: "We are cooler than you."

The clerk is of course automatically cooler than the customer because we are accepted by the public at large as snotty arbiters of movie taste, and also because anybody with a shit job is automatically cooler than someone with a 9-to-5. Too bad, no arguing, we're cooler. Our store is a nasal jewelry, snotty film school sort of place and we employ people coldblooded enough to work with hardcore pornography every single day of our lives (Oh, all right. Just every shift.) so there are plenty of extra bonus cool points right there. I have actually had word come back to me that people sometimes hate coming to our store because they feel their relative coolness is being rather harshly judged. I, as the least cool clerk (Cf: S.'s firing), sometimes feel bad about this, but many of my fellow clerks don't.

Music underlines that point, especially if it's scary music. Some of the clerks really like death metal - the kind of stuff that goes so far over the top that I end up pissing them off by giggling at it. I don't like death metal, but it does perform a valuable function - it puts a big, scary wall of cool between us and our customers. And nothing clears the porn section out faster after a long evening. Mason used to turn it up so loudly and so suddenly that we'd all run to the security monitor to see people flinch.

It sound childish, and it is, but sometimes it's there for a reason. We have a lot of whacked-out people coming into the store. Sometimes it feels like it helps to have a soundtrack of tough playing. It makes me feel like a puffer fish: "Back off, dammit," says our music, "There might be poison in here!"

But as I said, I'm over it, and the mornings are a little lower key. I don't care if people think I'm cool or not. I just want us all to be happy.

This week I made an important sale-bin discovery: Aquarius. Another Aqua CD. I'm really going to enjoy it if I can hear it over the sound of Renfield laughing.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 06-23-2002 at 04:24 AM.

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07-13-2002, 08:12 PM #22

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

World's Largest Cocks

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I sometimes worry that the porn section may be destroying my sense of proportion. I spend at least part of every shift face-to-face, as it were, with almost cartoonishly huge cocks.

The women's bodies on porn boxes are out of proportion too, but not to the extent that you'd think. I see a lot of fake breasts, sometimes distended to the point that they must be uncomfortable. I'm not just talking about the unwieldy size; on a few women the flesh of their breasts is stretched so tightly that their nipples are distorted. But that's rare - usually it's just the standard eerily spherical balloon breasts. Don't men know that real breasts hang? (Actually, I don't believe that men really can't spot fake breasts. I think they're just happy to have any breasts around and just don't care whether they're real or not. In a bizarre way, it's sort of a friendly policy.)

The implants, while definitely a major part of the straight porn world, are less omnipresent than you'd think, though. Many boxes, most notably those in the Real Naturals series, now promise that they only feature real breasts. And the porn industry, in its eagerness to please, has realized that many men don't even want big breasts. The young-stuff movies in particular, like the Barely Legal series feature smaller-proportioned women. I guess it's easier to pretend that a girl is jailbait if it looks like she could still have some breast development to go.

Eugh.

But anyway, I'm not really worried about losing my sense of proportion for female bodies. For one thing, I've got one of my own for reference, and for another I see normal female breasts every day. So do you. Even when they're clothed, they're pretty much out there. There are plenty of ordinary, walking-around reference points to keep a person in scale. (Now that I think about it, I'd be interested to know what body issues come up in, say, Inuit society.)

But with penises, I worry. Unlike breasts, you really don't see them until (one hopes) you get fairly friendly with their owners. There's just as not as much basis for comparison.

And as badly distorted as the female porn body can get, that's nothing compared to what happens to the men.

There's a series in the straight section called Mr. Eighteen Inches. Eighteen! Apparently twelve isn't even impressive anymore. The gay section has the Cocks as Big as This Box series. I find this title hilarious, because while I know they're only talking about length, I always picture all three dimensions. Where would they find pants?

Both the gay and straight sections have giant cock fixations. The straight section tends to be more graphic about it, usually showing just pictures of women posing with a giant cock and no guy attached at all, like they didn't have room for him in the picture. The gay section - though it certainly has some crude and graphic exceptions - tends to be a little more demure about it. The men are clothed on the front, then naked on the back. Usually the guy on the front just has his penis outlined through his clothing. Wet clothing is very popular. I think it's a nice way of handling it. The customer gets the idea that the cock in question is giant, erect, and undoubtedly throbbing, but it still leaves a little mystery.

(The exception is in the videos for guys that love foreskin. Uncut movies usually feature naked, flaccid cocks on the front.)

Anyway, stuff in the gay section definitely shows a healthy interest in larger-than-average plumbing, but there's also just as big an interest in beautiful men in general. For every box with a giant penis on the front, there are two more that just show a smiling, handsome man from the waist up. Clearly said handsome man has spent mind-numbing amounts of time at the gym, but at least he's not asking you to inspect his genitals.

(By the way, the guys on the gay boxes aren't just handsomer. They also seem nicer, somehow. The guys on the straight boxes are always frowning or grimacing or just looking mean. I understand that you don't need [or want] a handsome guy in a straight film, because holy shit, what if the straight guy watching it gets a little bit attracted?, but I haven't figured out why the guys on the straight boxes can't look friendly.)

Here's what the straight boxes have taught me, though: guys are the ones who care about giant cocks.

Not women, guys.

Especially the straight ones.

I understand porn's fascination with giant members because it's a visual medium and, let's face it, a dumb one. Giant cock is the quickest shorthand for virility. Big muscles = big strength, so why shouldn't big penis = tremendous power to satisfy?

Men are the ones who think a dick needs to be big to be satisfying. Sure, there are a few size queens out there, but as a rule women are way less picky about size as long as the owner of said penis learns to use it correctly. That's actually the heart of the problem - men assume that more penis automatically means more satsfaction, when in fact it has very little to do with it. I've known more than one woman who's been initially delighted to discover that she's with a larger man, only to realize to her disappointment that he thinks that all he has to do is be large. Conversely, one hears that overcompensation can be a lovely thing.

While I'm on the topic, I'll mention another quick gender-based misconception: when men refer to big, satisfying cocks, they talk in terms of length. Case in point, Mr. Eighteen Inches. Women, to the extent that they care at all, care about girth. When was the last time you heard a woman say "Wow, I bet that guy could really bruise my cervix!"?

But again, when it comes to the porn section we're not talking about anything in the normal human realm here. It doesn't even look like fun.

The porn box women, of course, love these huge genitals. There's even a series called Chasing the Big Ones. I think it's another form of metaphor - women who want giant cocks must really, really like sex, right? Insatiable means insatiable. Or something.

I think the reason straight guys like enormous schlongs, apart from the whole bigger = more powerful and more potent thing, is that it's an easy answer to Freud's unanswerable question: what do women want? The real answer is too hard. Women want you to be independent but emotionally available. They want you to be attached but not smothering. They want time and attention, and also some time alone. They want you to grow and change with them. They want you to be all kinds of things, and it's going to be a different list for every woman, and that list is always subject to change without notice. For some men, and many of my regular porn addicts, I think, fall into this category, the answer is that women want you to change that glaring personality flaw and learn to talk to them like a human being. Maybe they want you to take a frigging shower.

The other way is so much easier. What do women want? Enormous, glistening cocks. If you've got one, great, your job is done. No need to worry about anything else. If you don't, well, then if women don't like you it's not your fault.

But then, none of that applies to the gay section and I'm not a guy so who am I to speculate?

I guess guys just like big cocks because they're so frequently told that that's what manhood is all about. Sure, he donated a kidney to his daughter and all, but I hear he's hung like a gnat.

I feel bad for guys. There's definitely a lot of male pressure involved, but women certainly are guilty of their fair share of tiny penis jokes. It's awful to feel like your body is inadequate - I wish we as a gender wouldn't participate in perpetuating that particular bit of hurt.

There's a "clinic" that drops fliers in our store every few days. They say "BIG ENOUGH?" and of course, they're for penile enhancement surgery. What I've heard about breast enlargement surgery is that it's painful and dangerous, that the implants can leak or harden and cause all kinds of physical problems. I can't imagine that penile surgery is any safer or less painful, and all for what sounds like less than an inch of "improvement".

The fliers, when I see a new batch, become my good deed for the day. I throw them out.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 07-14-2002 at 01:14 AM.

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07-18-2002, 12:55 AM #23

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Can't Stop the Music

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I'm a monster.

Since my purchase of the second Aqua CD I've become positively Satanic about my musical choices. I do genuinely love it, but I also have to admit it's feeding a mean streak I never knew I had.

It started with just a nearly two-hour Aqua block at the beginning of my shift. Then I dug out the Right Said Fred CD. Right Said Fred are those British weightlifter/musicians who did "I'm Too Sexy," though if you ask me the best cut on the album is the magically bouncy "Don't Talk Just Kiss."

That was an excellent three-hour set (OK, yes, that's cruel and unusual. But dammit, if you're looking at porn for three CDs worth of time you've got to be prepared to take the consequences.) but recently I've started mixing it up. I'll play two of the three, then slip in a CD of something other people actually like and then go back to the dance music. I stun them with two quick jabs and then make them wait for the haymaker.

Again, my primary purpose is not to torture my customers, it just happens to work out really well that way. (Actually, they don't all hate it. Every now and then I'll catch someone dancing on the security monitor, which pleases me to no end. One guy who was all alone started doing the Bus Stop.)

I'm still closeted about it with the other clerks. I tend to time the more socially acceptable music for when my relief comes in. I don't know what I'll do when they discover me. Run into the swamps, I guess, and spend the rest of my life in hiding, quietly humming "We Are the Cartoon Heroes".

I don't know when it will end. I can pull an opener without caffeine, but not without Aqua.

[Hi. Thanks for reading this far. If you're new to this board, I encourage you to scroll down to the bottom, jump to the Journals forum, and check out some of the other journals on this board. There's some great stuff, and you and I both know you weren't going to get any work done anyway. - AD]

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07-23-2002, 02:21 AM #24

Ali Davis
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Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Women Who Aren't on the Boxes

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Today was a banner day, of sorts. Four women went into the porn section. They went down in pairs, a couple of hours apart.

Two were straight girls out shopping who went down to browse. They had shopping with them, and looked like they pretty much just wanted to see what it looked like. They just sort of wandered around a bit, keeping their distance from the shelves except for the occasional swoop in to look, and then left without getting anything. (The store is a bit notorious in the neighborhood and people do sometimes just wander in to see that, yup, there's porn, and then leave.)

The other two were a lesbian couple. They were there with more purpose. One came up to the counter and asked if we had lesbian porn, then they both went downstairs to look. They scoped the place out pretty thoroughly, made a couple of selections, then came up and set up a membership. I was glad they found something they liked. While we do have lesbian porn, we don't really have porn that's aimed at lesbians. I'm not sure how to back up that statement. Arguably, hot chicks having sex with each other is aimed at much at lesbians as at straight men... only it isn't. It's just the feel of the thing - a general "Hey, fellas! Getta load of this!" vibe.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think so. We don't get much repeat lesbian business. In fact, there's only one that I've seen that has ever come back, and her visits are months apart. I just don't think there's much for her.

Anyway, I was surprised at the sudden surge of female traffic. I can go for weeks on end without seeing a woman down there at all.

I know there is porn aimed at women in the world, but we don't really carry it. I try my best to help steer the women who do come in towards something they'll like, which is difficult. For one thing, porn is a pretty personal choice, and for another, I don't actually know that much about it. The last thing I want to do at the end of my shift is check out a little porn. (This is true of the guys too, actually, and sometimes it freaks them out. To be a 20-year-old male and numbed out to porn is, apparently, a scary thing.)

In the interest of good clerking, I did finally ask my manager and learn to steer my straight female customers towards Wicked Video stuff, which have budgets and stories and nobody gets called a dumb cunt on the box copy.

I think I'm a pretty good guide. The women that do come in solo - and they are very, very rare - are usually pretty uncomfortable about it. It doesn't help that our porn section is a completely white room with a white linoleum floor lit by bright white flourescent lights broken up by security cameras and wall-to-wall orifices. It hits somewhere between futuristic alien clinic and porn carnival. If our decor makes a statement, it's "Hey, fucko! Don't masturbate!" It's just not a cosy or welcoming place. So I try to be both as businesslike and as gentle as possible. I want them to know that it's fine and normal to rent porn, and that they're safe. Sometimes I'll ask another clerk or a manager to cover my register and go down with them. It seems to help get them acclimated.

Usually the women that come in are half of a straight couple. They cover the full range of comfort and discomfort. My favorite was a pretty girl with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a Laura Ashley flowered dress. When I went down to ask if she and her boyfriend needed help she belted out "Yes! We want to BUY!" while he stood blushing in the corner.

Most are pretty quiet, though, and usually let the guy take the lead.

I don't think it's that women are less sexual than men. I think they could or would like porn if the situation were different. There are still fairly big taboos about women admitting to being interested in porn - even for the ones who rent pretty racy stuff from upstairs. And the movies would have to be different. There'd have to be more about why these people are having sex. A better reason than Tab A fitting into Slot B, at least.

And, from what I do know about porn, the sex would have to be different. It doesn't look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They're always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don't seem to be getting touched much. They're just getting poled by some guy who's apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee.

So we don't get many women downstairs.

I hope the few brave feminine souls who do go down there find what they're looking for.

Ali Davis
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07-23-2002, 02:23 AM #25

Ali Davis
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Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Oh, by the way...

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Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.

I am not fired.

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07-26-2002, 05:07 AM #26

Ali Davis
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Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Men and Women and Porn

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Here's what I've learned in my year-and-change as a porn clerk: men like porn.

Admittedly, my sample is skewed because many men come to our store just for the porn and have other accounts elsewhere, but almost all of the men that come in do eventually go down to the porn section. And I don't mean "almost all" in the 90% sense, I mean all but maybe two since I've started working there.

This is a lesson because I now understand that pretty much any man I date is going to at least occasionally rent and enjoy porn. I don't think a lot of women have fully dealt with that. If one reads the advice columns, a lot of women can't even deal with the idea that their mate masturbates at all. Ladies, please. Chill out.

What the porn section has taught me that I think many women don't understand is that porn is a physical thing for guys, not an emotional one. It seems to be a quick, physical release. It's a way of feeling good and making sure the plumbing is still in good working order and that's about it. With the exception of the addicts, I don't think it has any more significance than grabbing a burger when you're hungry or standing up and stretching when you've been trapped in a car all day.

Many women are jealous of or threatened by porn, and we shouldn't be. The key is the difference between your dog, which is a Sheltie-terrier mix that hides under the bed during thunderstorms, has a passion for cat food and prefers tug-of-war to fetch, and the general dogness of the "dog" in the dictionary.

I think a woman in a porn movie, as a rule, is taken as a general woman rather than a specific woman. She is there to stand in for general womanness. (And, based the number of rewind fees I dish out, once the viewer comes she ceases to exist.)

I think guys rent porn as a way to have the pleasure of sex without the added complexity of having to tend to someone else's needs. Which doesn't mean that he's a bad guy or won't do plenty of tending later, it's just that right now he just wants to wolf down a burger.

In a way, a guy who is renting a porn video is courteously having his selfish sex on his own time so he won't bother you with it. And "selfish" isn't a bad thing here. It's also selfish to take a hot bath and read a book by yourself, but it's important to do that every now and then.

And besides, if you had a choice between your guy renting a video and renting a person, which would you choose?

Now that I've cleared up that little misunderstanding for all time, here's what men don't understand about porn: women do take it personally. When a woman sees your porn rental, she is likely to conclude that that is what you want. The sex act in question, the level of communication, the inflated porn body, all of it. In all likelihood she doesn't see the woman on the box as a convenient avatar of general woman-ness, she sees her as tangible proof that what the owner of said box really, truly wants is a nineteen-year-old emacaited blonde with enormous fake breasts and a deep desire to take it up the ass.

This is why a gentleman is very, very careful about leaving his porn lying around the house.

Communication can't hurt and all that, but screw that, I'm not an advice columnist. I just think, based on what I've seen, that men and women look at porn very differently and it can't hurt for both sides to take that into account.

I think it's cool when couples rent porn together, and I'm impressed with how much they had to do to get there, or with what I hope they did, anyway.

I know it's fashionable to say that men and women are fundamentally different again - God, I cannot wait for that particular social pendulum to swing back - but I don't think they are, or at least not in this case. I think attitudes toward porn have a lot to do with socialization. There's a pressure to overpersonalize sex on one side, and to depersonalize it on the other. As always, I think moderation in all things is a good way to go.

Figuring this out has helped me understand my customers better, I think. Knowing the guy is watching for general sex and not specific sex makes it easier to see why we have those four-hour clip jobs of just come shots. Keeping in mind that what our clients are renting is physical and not emotional or mental keeps me from caring too much about what they're renting, and in many ways that detachment is a key part of my job. (Trust me - the guy with the Iowa driver's license and the wedding ring does *not* want me to care about the fact that he's renting gay porn.)

In a way, I keep learning the same lesson over and over again: just because people's tastes don't match mine doesn't mean they're wrong. Soon, I hope, it'll stick.

Ali Davis
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08-22-2002, 12:06 AM #27

Ali Davis
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Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Do Not Feed the Clerks

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I've never understood why people give us food, but they do. I mean, yeah, none of us are working there because we're so bored with collecting those interest checks on our trust funds, but there are plenty of starving brethren in the customer service industry. Why us?

The first couple of times a customer offered me food, I kept saying "no, thanks" as politely as I could. One guy kept pressing an "extra" doughnut he'd bought on me so eagerly that there was no way in hell I was going to eat it. I was new then and the possibility of someone replacing the Boston Creme with roofies seemed like a very real possibility, so I finally just took it and threw it away as soon as he was out the door. I couldn't figure out the impulse. While I've been fond of many a video clerk in my past, it never occured to me to feed them.

Like everything else, though, I've gotten used to it. People have given us stuff on Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. One guy has, on more than one occasion, brought us cookies. Really good ones from a gourmet store. He's neither one of the creepiest customers nor one of the chattiest. He'll perk up if we say hi, but it's not like he's hanging around dying to be our friend. Why the baked goods?

I finally adopted a policy of eating food that customers had dropped by, but only if one of the other clerks has eaten it without incident first. Perhaps it was wrong to use my coworkers as mineshaft canaries, but trust me, they'd have eaten it anyway.

Our main benefactor, though, is Mr. Tint. Mr. Tint was the first regular I got to know, and that was at the angry insistence at the other clerks. I was working a night shift and the phone rang. "Who's your daddy?" said the voice on the other end. It was my first week and I'd already fielded several prank calls, so I hung up.

He called back: "Who's your daddy?" I hung up again. I mentioned to the other clerks on duty that I'd just fielded two prank calls from the same idiot and when I told them what he'd said they almost strangled me with the phone cord. Apparently that was Mr. Tint's way of saying hello. Once you correctly identified him as your daddy, he'd bring by food.

Lots of food. Enough for everybody to eat dinner and then some.

Mr. Tint works in several capacities in the food industry and has access to a lot of it. He brings it by all the time - usually a couple of times a week at least.

I wouldn't eat it for a long time; it was just too weird. Casey, who started just a little before I did, was creeped out by it too. His theory was that Mr. Tint was fattening us up to eat us, and he was only mostly kidding.

Eventually, though, we all succumbed. We've all had more than one evening in which we weren't sure how we'd get dinner if Mr. Tint didn't drop by.

What he got out of it, of course, was a shitload of free rentals. Management knew what was going on and winked at it, figuring that it was a pretty good perk for the clerks at very little cost to the store. Like several tipping situations I've been in, the value of what he was bringing by was way, way more than he'd have spent if he'd simply paid for his videos. (On the other hand, I don't know that he paid for it. I ran into him at a mailing store once and he also had some sort of goods-for-services thing going over there. I think Mr. Tint enjoys living by the barter system and feeling like he's getting away with something.)

But he also got a very special regular status at the store, the kind Mr. Buddy would kill for. Mr. Tint, having delivered his manna from heaven, would choose his videos (or pick up the ones we'd held behind the counter for him) and then hang out and chat. We're talking 45 minutes at a time of chatting, customers or not.

It was a delicate situation. He definitely made it difficult to properly attend to our other customers, and there was at least one incident before my tenure in which Mr. Tint so distracted the clerks (and blocked their view of the sales racks) that several items were stolen while he chatted away.

It's difficult, though, to ask someone to piss off when your mouth is full of his pizza.

Mr. Tint is still a regular, but his glory days are over. S's firing made management go through the free rentals with a fine-toothed comb, and our side of the barter is no longer available. Our assistant manager told him as gently as possible that he'd have to pay for his movies, but it was still a hard transition.

He still chats a lot, and still lays a tacit claim to super-regular status, which we have to explain to the newer clerks. Sometimes he'll even drop by food, but without the free rentals the joy is gone.

I'm sort of glad it's over. He saved my bacon on many an evening, but it was weird to take his food, even when he was getting something out of it. He could barter free rentals, but not quite the friendships he seemed to be hoping to get out of it, and that was awkward, to say the least.

People still drop by food sometimes, but I've returned to my old policy of not eating it. I don't really think people want to poison us, but until I feel like I have a better handle on what they do want I don't feel right accepting it.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 08-26-2002 at 03:46 PM.

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09-03-2002, 03:14 PM #28

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Home Is the Sailor

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I've been back at the store for just over a week after all my summer traveling. I was away for a wholesome vacation to national parklands with my family, then off to an actual performing gig with my improv group. The family trip included my (much younger) little sisters and the show was in a foriegn country where porn is illegal (though I hear they're having a bit of trouble with the Internet) so my vacation was blissfully, totally porn free. I'd sort of forgotten that that's how my life used to be - no involvement whatsoever with the secret desires of total strangers.

I wish the transition back had been a harder one, but no. I slipped right back into my World of Orifices without batting an eye.

My first day back I actually picked up a shift at one of our other locations; after all that gallivanting around, I need the hours. It doesn't have nearly as good a spot for foot traffic as my branch, so the day got pretty boring. I knew that a lot of our regulars have memberships at both stores, and I couldn't stop myself from checking.

They hate Mr. Pig too.

Since then I've been back at my usual branch, trying to get back up to speed. I'm off my game a bit - I used to get compliments on how well I rattled off the New Membership Speech, but now I have to stop and think about it.

New Memberships, by the way, suck. They suck hard. I know they keep the store in business and all, but Good Lord do we hate them. They take a clerk out of commission for anywhere from 5-10 minutes (which is not so much during the midmorning lull, but an eternity during the 4 o' clock rush) and if two new memberships get going at once, forget it - we've created a traffic snarl that's not going to get untied for the next hour or so.

No one ever listens to the New Membership speech. By the time we get through all the paperwork and the ID checks they just want to get the hell away from the counter and rent some frigging movies and they don't want to hear it. We could tell them they have to give us hair and urine samples with every return and they'd just nod and step up their get-on-with-it body language.

We are, in fact, telling them important information like the fact that we don't have a drop box, but it's a lot to take in all at once and people just glaze over. Which doesn't help either of us a week later when they're back at the counter, this time trembling with rage over their late fees.

I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't a big sign over my head outlining the very same policies covered in the New Member Speech. People almost never read the sign - not even a glance at it to see what sort of information it might contain if they chose to read it at some later date.

The quickest way for a new member to win instant and massive goodwill from me is to actually read the sign. "Now how much are rentals - oh, it's right up there!" is sweet, sweet music to my ears. This is a customer who makes an effort to adjust to new surroundings by looking for and absorbing helpful information. This is a customer who will return his late films and accept his fees with grace, knowing that said late fees were his own fault. This is a customer who will not bitch about the fact that he didn't return his movies on Labor Day because he assumed that we'd be closed and how the hell was he supposed to know we'd be open? because he saw - and read - the giant sign to that effect that was posted on the front door.

But most people don't read the signs and they zone out during the speech and they get really angry about late fees. They feel violated. Even though they had both written and verbal warnings of our policies, and even though we gave them a printout with the due dates on it. I know that late fees suck, but less than half our customers seem to be able to psychologically deal with the fact that they're the ones who checked out the movies and they're the ones who kept them late.

My favorite angry-customer tactic is stalking off and threatening to go to Blockbuster. They think they are cutting us to the core and that we'll run to them and hug their knees and beg for forgiveness. Well, no. The local Blockbuster has a truly crappy selection. Godspeed and welcome to it.

But I digress. Other than a higher-than-usual Crazy Magnet setting, my first week back was uneventful. I've mostly been trying to get up to speed with what the new high-demand porn tapes are and doing a bit of quiet mourning over the dismal performance of my Employee Picks section. You people don't know what you're missing.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 09-03-2002 at 04:13 PM.

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09-04-2002, 03:51 PM #29

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Ali's List of Employee Picks that Nobody Ever Rents

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American Movie
Heavenly Creatures
The Haunting (original, thank you very much)
The Interview
The Manchurian Candidate
One False Move
Run Lola Run
Say Anything
Shadow of a Doubt
Strictly Ballroom
The Warriors

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09-11-2002, 02:00 AM #30

Ali Davis
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Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

I Don't Date My Customers

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That's not a set personal policy, really, just the way it's worked out. I don't date my customers and I don't imagine that I ever will. (Mr. Gentle, for the record, rents gay, and for this and a few other reasons I've always worked under the assumption that he's not a romantic prospect. So those of you who have written me about him can chill out. But thanks.)

I'm not saying it's never crossed my mind. When I first thought about video clerking as a temporary supplemental career, everyone I knew seemed to have a story about a crush on a video clerk. "Oh, my God!" My sister swooned, then launched into a tale of the young god who used to work at her local store. She was not alone, and I had high hopes.

I'd never had a crush on a video clerk, but there had been a quite a few I'd really wanted to impress. I think the allure has something to do with the combination of intimacy and aloofness, and, whether warranted or not, the previously mentioned sheen of Video Clerk Cool.

I've certainly developed crushes on a few rental histories. Mr. Scruffy's is almost too good to be true - it's almost a film education in itself. All the classics, all the indies, all the greats. It's intimidatingly good, really - the kind of rental history that both inspires me to expand my film knowledge and makes me feel like a complete troglodyte for having rented and enjoyed Deep Blue Sea. While Mr. Scruffy has the rental history I wish I had, Ms. Leather Jacket has pretty much the rental history I do have. Sure, lots of capital-G Good stuff, but also a healthy appreciation for The Evil Dead II.

But something always gets in the way. For one thing, I'm very much aware that it's creepy for me to be noticing what people rent at all, so I do make a sincere effort to cut it out. And a great rental history doesn't necessarily mean I'd actually enjoy watching movies with its creator. There are plenty of scumballs with excellent taste in movies. (By the way, while I'm on the topic, having good taste in movies does not absolve you from all crimes. If you're one of the dirtsacks who keeps stealing our rental copies of Wet Hot American Summer and The Big Lebowski, please be aware that this does not make you a resourceful collector, it makes you a fucking thief. Yes, even if you are white and middle class and in college. Even if it's all to feed your sophsticated appreciation of Japanese animation. You are a fucking thief, and you're no better than the guy downstairs who reeks of stale whiskey and is trying to tear pictures off the porn boxes with his teeth. Please keep that image in mind the next time you sit down to watch your ill-gotten copy of Akira.)

But I digress. The main barrier to dating my customers is the fact that virtually all of my male customers (we don't get many lesbians) end up down in the porn section. I'm aware - very aware, nowadays - that any man I date will probably rent and enjoy porn while I'm with him, and that's fine. But that doesn't mean it's something I'd like to chat about right off the bat. I've had a (very) few customers try to flirt or hit on me, but it's just too weird. I think they've forgotten that they're in the middle of renting porn, but I haven't. Essentially, they they're being their very suavest with me and then ending by saying "See you later - off to masturbate!" It's just too much to know.

I used to have pretty good conversations with one of my customers a few months ago. He was a nice guy, and we had similar-though-not-identical tastes in movies. We had some pretty good debates, chewing over things like why I ended up hating Fire Walk with Me and why he ended up loving it. He started sort of flirting and I started thinking about it. Thinking favorably, in fact.

He's African-American and I'm white, which suddenly became relevant on the day that he came in, browsed and chatted a bit, flirted a bit, then went downstairs and came up with five porn titles, all from Black Dicks in White Chicks and other similarly-themed series.

I told this story to a few friends, all of whom had the same reaction: "Did he realize what he was doing?"

I don't know if he knew what he was doing or not when he brought the tapes up, but the minute I glanced at the tapes we both knew it was the wrong thing. It was just too weird. We'd destroyed the impersonality of his porn rental by chatting, and made the chatting way too personal with his porn rental.

It's the polite fiction again. Sure, flirtation or an invitation on a date implies at least some sexual interest, but there's something to be said for a little mystery.

He didn't come back to the store for a long time, which I think was more comfortable for both of us, and now we don't chat anymore, which is too bad.

So as I said, I don't think dating my customers is ever going to happen, largely because I get to know them in reverse - I learn about their deepest kinks first, and then I get around to learning their names a few months later. It's just as well. When it comes to the porn section, it's more comfortable for everyone if I stay disengaged.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 09-11-2002 at 06:20 AM.

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09-18-2002, 03:35 AM #31

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Mr. Hazy

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Mr. Hazy was the first customer I got to know at the store - certainly the first name I learned. Like anywhere else, the first people I learned at the video store were the complete nightmares and the really nice ones (we have lots of normal customers; I just don't need to write about them) but Mr. Hazy was an exception to that rule. I learned him first simply because he was at the video store all the frigging time. Like Mr. Buddy, he's spent literally thousands of dollars in rentals. He's like clockwork - in, six hardcore porn videos and then back again within a day or at most two. He does have to stagger his schedule a bit - Wednesdays and Fridays are new porn days and he can't miss those, so it's tough to fall into a strict two-day rhythm what with these darn seven day weeks we insist on keeping.

Besides, sometimes he gets through six videos in a day just fine.

That six videos in a day thing used to astonish me - it seemed superhuman - but then I got clued into the fact that a lot of the heavy renters are doing a lot of fast-forwarding. They have to burn a lot of video to get to what they want.

At least I hope to God that's what they're doing. How could you spend twelve hours a day masturbating? Wouldn't you get bored? Would calluses eventually become a problem? Some of our six-a-day customers, obviously, are just pirating our tapes, but not all of them. I know. Trust me.

I don't know why five or six videos a day creep me out but not, say, three. Why should six solid hours a day of masturbation be a reasonable amount of time? I have no idea. It's something internal that I can't seem to logic away: I have no problem with three or four hardcore pornographic videos a day, but five or six is excessive. Perhaps I shouldn't have children.

Anyway, Mr. Hazy is definitely not pirating. As I mentioned, Wednesday and Friday are New Porn Days and he has to hit them because he has seen all of our other straight videos. I'll type that again: He has seen all of our straight videos. Try though we do to rotate the stock, we just can't keep up.

That, my friends, is why I feel comfortable using the phrase "porn addiction".

Mr. Hazy isn't the only one that's finished off the store. There are several customers that have seen everything we carry, or at least everything that floats their particular boats. That's why I loathe New Porn Days. We don't get the new stock out until at least 4 or 5 o' clock at the earliest - sometimes we don't even receive the shipment until then - but people start calling at about 10 in the morning and the frequency of the calls and intensity of the whining only increase as the day goes on. (Mr. Hazy, to his credit knows the system and doesn't show up until 4 or 5.)

People want to paw through the new boxes. The want us to bring them over to the counter so they can stare at them. They want us to read off the new titles, never mind the woman with the three small children standing at the counter. They want to see and touch and rent the new tapes, and they want them NOW.

I haven't quite pegged exactly why people get so frantic over New Porn Day, or why it's so important to rent the new movies *first*. I think part of it is that, yeah, they've seen everything and here's a new shipment of new bodies and new fucking and another shot at or variation of whatever they're looking for, but I also think it has something to do with the firstness of it. I think some of them get off on knowing that they are the first to whack off to that particular tape. I don't think they care about being the only one, but there does seem to be something about being the first one. "Don't rent it to anybody else," they'll scream into the phone, "I'm on my way!"

Every week or two, there's a new title in the gay section that everyone wants, and we'll start getting calls for it days ahead of time. People call, they beg, they bitch, they try to put it on the reserve list for days in a row. We do our best. The thing is, the movie is hot for two weeks and then forget it - only the poor stragglers who missed the first time want it and then it slowly fades away. It seems simple to figure out that if you just held off for a few days and got yourself a week or two behind the cycle, you could rent the almost-new-but-no-longer-hot releases at your leisure and without all the heartache, but that's not what people want. They want the newest.

I sometimes wonder if it's something akin to the virginity thing or if my renters are, deep down, just as creeped out by some of their fellow renters as I am. If so, I wish they'd think about that for a minute before turning in a spooged out tape that's still stopped in the middle at the exact spot where they came.

Anyway, Mr. Hazy seems to be more about the novelty than the firstness. New Porn Day is actually the easiest day to deal with Mr. Hazy, because as long as he's getting six new videos he's happy. When he's really selecting videos, we have to be careful. Mr. Hazy has terrible eyesight and can't actually read the tags, so he doesn't always know what he's renting. He just finds a box that he likes and pulls the tag hanging underneath. Usually that's fine, but our customers, as a rule, do not hold degrees in library science. They'll pick up handfuls of tags and then just stick them back under any old movie, or they'll wander around with boxes in their hands, deep in Porn Trance. As a new box catches their eyes, they'll pick it up and put the old box in its place, leaving us with a daisy chain of misplaced boxes to untangle. We catch and fix stuff as best we can, but we're only human. Mr. Hazy doesn't check the title on the tag against the title on the box because he can't, so sometimes what he has is just a random collection of movies for us to pull.

Porn hits a childlike, needy place in many (if not most) of our renters. They were promised a treat and they want it now and if it's already been given away to one of the other kids or not quite the right flavor some of the guys look like they're going to burst right into tears. Mr. Hazy doesn't look like he's going to cry, but he gets really, really pissed if one of his (six!) rentals for the evening turns out to be the wrong one, and he can really make a stink.

Complicating the problem is the fact that we have several regulars who try to take dirtbag advantage of the fact that we don't make customers pay for incorrect videos. Suddenly we'll see a sudden upswing in a customer getting the "wrong" videos and it's time to put a note on the guy's account and doublecheck every single frigging thing he checks out every single time so he knows we're on to him.

Mr. Hazy was the first customer I blew my cool with - the only one who's really gotten me angry enough to show it, actually. He'd already come in several times on my watch and turned in the "wrong" movies and this time he said that something like four of the six were wrong and he shouldn't have to pay for them and on top of that he started yelling at me for whoever had so screwed up his rental.

I pointed out that he had a suspiciously high incident of "clerk mistakes" and he said he hadn't done that in weeks and it ended with me putting each new tape in his face and saying "Is this the correct tape?" before slamming it onto the counter. My fellow clerk Jonathan, who knew that I don't drink or smoke, suggested I take a break and have a beer and a cigarette.

Casey later theorized that Mr. Hazy simply couldn't read, which made me go easier on him and try to feel more charitable, though by then we were sworn enemies. Actually, as I said, he's simply visually impaired and too vain - or something - to wear his eyeglasses. Which is an interesting lesson in vanity, I think. He didn't want us to know he needs glasses, so one of us assumed he was a lying cheating dirtbag and another assumed he was illiterate. If he'd just said he had sight problems in the first place, we'd have put a note on his file and given him all the extra help he needed. Now we know, and we do.

Ali Davis
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09-25-2002, 03:27 PM #32

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Store Meeting

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We had a staff meeting this Monday night. Meetings start, of course, after we close, which is 11 pm. This one went until 1:30 (we get time and a half and pizza. Whee!) and of course I was Tuesday morning's opener.

The meeting actually went very well. It's a good, fun crew right now so everyone was pretty cheerful about it, and it looks like we might actually get a workable DVD storage system.

I just thought I'd mention it because we spent a good 15 minutes discussing how publicly a guy has to be masturbating before we can bust him. Obviously, if he whips it out we call the police. Hands down the front of his sweatpants is at least a visit from the Voice of God mike, and a call to the police if we feel like it. (Almost all whackers wear sweatpants. Some of the clerks argue that it's just a symptom of having given up on the rules of society, but I think it's simply the easy access.)

Then we got into grayer areas. Specifically, guys who masturbate through their pockets. The evening shift is being plagued by a regular who gropes himself through his khakis. We actually had a discussion on how actively a guy's hand has to be in his pocket before we should bust him. We decided on a quick blast from the call button, which makes a piercing beep, or a pointed "Everything OK down there?" on the Voice of God mike just to let him know we're keeping an eye on him.

I can't believe we actually spent that much time and energy giving the benefit of the doubt to jerkers. I can't believe we're all actually working from a position of not embarassing these guys. I don't want to embarrass the pocket-whackers either, but why? We all know the rules.

So just as a quick refresher, I'll mention this: While it is perfectly healthy to touch yourself in the privacy of your own home, with special friends, or in special clubs that I don't want to know about so please for the love of God do not e-mail me about them, IT IS NEVER, EVER OKAY TO MASTURBATE IN PUBLIC.

Also it would be nice if you wouldn't crumple up trash and stuff it under our computer monitors.

Thank you.

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09-27-2002, 06:16 AM #33

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Instant Karma

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I had a pretty good morning this morning. I'm in the good swing of my porn emotional sine wave, where everything is hilarious instead of depressing. Actually, it's not quite a sine wave - I spend a fair amount of time in numb flatlining mode where nothing even registers. And there are exceptions: There's a Black Man in My Wife's Ass! always breaks me up no matter how bad a day I'm having. [Not all the titles can always do that. On bad days, Whose Pussy Is This? is a faintly disturbing illustration of sexual domination politics, since I know the proper answer is a breathy "It's yours!" rather than "It's mine, dickhead!" On good days, though, it's a particularly entertaining glimpse into the Lost and Found office.]

Thursdays are usually quiet, and today was definitely slow-paced, but I did have a pretty good stream of semi-regulars.

Mr. Moustache came in with another short stack of porn. I feel bad for Mr. Moustache, and I'm not sure if I should (or could) intervene. He's one of the guys who, I'm guessing, rents porn because he has a little trouble with finding actual women. In my experience most, though by no means all, porn renters fall into one of four major types:

1. Chippers - Chippers by definition aren't regulars. They stop by once to pick up stuff for a party, maybe again six months later when they're a little drunk after a Cubs game. Either they don't watch much porn or they get it off the Internet. Either way, I don't see 'em much.

2. Normal, Healthy Porn Renters - These make up the vast majority of my renters. They come in a little more often than the chippers, but not so much that it seems to be making up a major part of their lives. NHPRs may or may not be married or dating someone - the porn is an occasional supplement to a normal sex life with normal ups and downs.

3. Substituters - These are the guys, both straight and gay, who appear to be renting porn in lieu of having sex with other people. Sometimes it's due to a reclusive or difficult personality, sometimes to, uh, nontraditionally handsome looks. Obviously I can only make an educated guess as to whether someone is an NHPR or a substituter, but sometimes I feel like I'm making a damn good guess. It's usually based on rental frequency, the attitude of the guy returning the tapes (Substituters tend to be the most defensive) and a few other personal cues.

4. Addicts - Yup, addicts. Anyone who routinely spends spends six or more hours a day watching porn. Yes, it's an arbitrary number, but I think I'm being pretty damn reasonable. We're talking about a third of their waking lives here. Sure, there are grey areas and extenuating circumstances. That doesn't mean there aren't also addicts.

Anyway, Mr. Moustache seems to be a substituter. The thing is, he seems to be an OK guy. I think the only reason he's in the position of substituting is that the moustache in question is a huge, revolting 70's porn moustache. It's just terrible. I'm not sure what effect he thinks he's pulling off, but that can't be it. I wish I could just tell him - if he dropped the 'stache I'm pretty sure he'd do a little better with the ladies. But he clearly likes his moustache and it's not my place and, hell, as it is he's a good customer.

My next regular to come in was Mr. Smooth. Mr. Smooth always, always hits on me. He says one or two generally friendly things, works in either a compliment or an attempt at a double entendre, then asks what time I get off work or assures me that he'll see me later or any other traditional post-hitting-on parting remark. He always glances at me over his shoulder as he walks away and gives me the sly, smug smile of a man who has just done very well for himself.

Today there was a note on his file from one of the other female clerks about how he always hits on her. I was relieved that I wasn't the only one receiving Mr. Smooth's attention, but I'll admit I was also faintly disappointed at the discovery that I have no special allure. Ah, well.

Mr. God came in a little later. He wouldn't be a particularly distinctive renter if it weren't for the huge button he always wears, which I think is homemade:

GOD IS.
IN FULL CONTROL

I am fascinated by the quirky punctuation and always wonder if it was intentional and, if so, what that means.

Mr. God always rents hardcore porn, and it's hard to keep myself from having a knee-jerk snotty reaction to that. If he's so pious, why is he renting Freaks, Hos and Flows? Which would be a good point on my part if it weren't so hypocritical. One of my beefs with traditional Christianity is that most sects treat sex as a dirty or sinful thing. I like the fact that say, Taoism, treats sex as not only good but sacred. Why the hell can't God be. In full control and enjoy a little porn? I should fully support that. But still, my initial reaction is always a superior internal snort at the juxtaposition of the button with a bag full of Up and Cummers. Maybe I should get some sort of shock collar.

Mr. Diamond came in later, and I had a revelation. Mr. Diamond likes to rent the new releases upstairs in the general release section.He never has a new release in mind, he always just asks what's new and then wants to know what they're about. He always comes to the counter and asks what the new releases are even though they're posted on a sign, and he always asks me to show him which boxes those are even though, of course, the titles are on the boxes. Well, a lot of people don't like to find things for themselves and he usually comes in when it's pretty quiet so it's not really a problem. It wasn't until Zoolander was released a few months ago that I realized he couldn't keep up with me when I pointed to the new releases too quickly and, more tellingly, when looking for Zoolander Mr. Diamond hadn't seemed to notice the giant row of bright green and white boxes that said "Zoolander" across the front.

Mr. Diamond could not read.

I became a model clerkly compassion. I did my best to help him out without letting him know that I'd twigged to his secret. I put a discreet note on his file so the other clerks would help him out and avoid recommending new releases with subtitles. I admired the fact that he covered so well, that he'd risen to the point of being able to afford his diamond without being able to read. I wondered what his life was like and was quietly proud of myself for being such a terrific person as to help him without embarrassing him.

Anyway, I'm an idiot because today while I went back to the counter to help with a printer jam he read a box perfectly well on his own. Turns out he doesn't like to use his glasses either. I can't believe I've done that twice now. Anyway, his new releases were all checked out, so I suggested Lantana and sent him on his way. I hope he likes it; it'll make me feel better.

It occurs to me that this entry's title actually fits my own comeuppance for being so smug about what a swell gal I was being to Mr. Diamond scant days after remembering that I'd made a literacy/myopia mistake with Mr. Hazy, but I'd actually intended it for another incident.

A man came in today and a note popped up on his file: "This charmer shoved his tapes on the counter in front of the disabled guy who wasn't getting out of his way fast enough."

The man is screwed for life at our store and he doesn't even know it. No, we won't be deliberately mean to him or short change him or anything like that. But we also won't cut him a break on late fees or give him the benefit of the doubt on damage claims or go out of our way to help him out, which we frequently do.

Clerk Karma happens more for our customers than people think, and it's odd how far-reaching, if minor, the effects can be. Even the highest management will take a note into an account. A fee on an account with a note that says "This guy admits it was his fault but he was really cool about it." usually gets reduced by the Powers that Be. "This guy screamed at me for 20 minutes." is unlikely to get the same friendly reprieve.

I like it. We're not penalizing the jerks so much as rewarding the good, and it's comforting to know that life sometimes works that way, even if it's on a small scale. And of course, many small scales I don't know about may be adding up all over town.

We help people out as often as we doom them. A simple "Good guy" or "She's really nice" can invisibly smooth a customer's rental paths for months to come, even if it just means a succession of especially friendly clerks.

I wonder if our customers ever think about the fact that the hand that helps balance out the scales of the universe may have just landed in a wad of their semen.

Ali Davis
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10-09-2002, 01:59 AM #34

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Out of Context

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My friend Joe used to be a counselor. He wasn't a psychiatrist, but the counseling was of that nature - sometimes pretty heavy stuff. One of the rules was that if he saw one of the people he was working with out on the street, he wasn't allowed to show recognition unless they greeted him first. It was a small city and being greeted by the counselor could mean that suddenly everybody knew you had problems.

I sometimes feel like that. Our store is very much a neighborhood store, and I see my regulars out all the time. I try not to recognize them until they acknowledge me. I used to automatically smile and say hi and most people were fine with that, but it did make a few people uncomfortable.

I saw two regulars out of the store last week. Monday was the most startling: I was heading to my theater for a show and suddenly Mr. Buddy leaned out the window of the restaurant next door. It took everything I had to keep from doing a take. I said hi and hotfooted it on my way without telling him where I was going. Mr. Buddy is harmless, but for some reason the thought of him seeing my show weirded me out to no end.

Over the weekend I ran into Mr. Dreadlocks. We'd come to the same peace march. I hadn't seen Mr. Dreadlocks in months - he finally did something weird or upsetting enough that the general manager cancelled his account. (I don't know what, and I feel like if I hit the point where I care enough to ask I've crossed an important line.) I didn't end up talking to Mr. Dreadlocks. We'd always gotten along just fine, but in this case I didn't know what to say. I didn't know why he'd had his account cancelled or under what circumstances he was asked not to come back; a cheerful howyadoin might not have been appropriate.

It's hard not to wonder. Sure, he was creepy, but we have plenty of creepy people in the store. If creepy got you cancelled, we'd be out of business. I'm guessing the way he fetishized the tapes it was either a lube or tampering issue. On the other hand, he was really, really into charging small amounts on his American Express card. Three or more $3.69 rentals a day, charged separately an hour or two apart from each other. This was a pain in the ass for the store - credit card transactions under $10.00 can actually lose us money - and we couldn't figure out if it was just a side effect of the fetish or if he was trying to work some angle or what.

At any rate, Mr. Dreadlocks, already a little bit crazy and a little bit sleazy, did something crazy or sleazy or maybe just irritating enough that he can't rent our movies anymore.

He was ahead of me in the march, so I couldn't read the sign he was carrying for a while. My group was a little faster paced than his, and during the course of the march we passed him. I couldn't resist - I had to glance over my shoulder and see his sign.

It was yellow and plastic, with blue cursive writing. It was a sign advertising another, completely different event. For the summer of 2000.

I think I'm going to miss him.

Ali Davis
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10-15-2002, 04:53 PM #35

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

No More Ms. Nice Gal.

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Arrrrggghhh.

I was having a lovely morning, right up until the end. Tuesday openers are very slow and I've grown to like them. I get my checklist of clerkly tasks done early and then, except for a very occasional customer, the morning is pretty much mine. It's not a bad way to ease into the day.

Today was going just swell. A little cleaning, a little introspection, and all quiet except for a regular or two.

He came in around 9:30. He was a big guy, dressed in baggy clothes, and he looked like he was either going to ask for an application or how you get a membership. (Correct on membership.) Lots of people come in in baggy clothes looking like they're going to ask for an application or a membership, and most of them do. What made this guy distinctive was his hair.

I'll go ahead and admit right off, I am not a fan of white-boy dreadlocks. Someone else can make the arguments about whether it's appropriating or appreciating someone else's culture; I just think they look silly.

This guy had gone one better: He had made an attempt at white-boy cornrows, but apparently hadn't felt like waiting for his hair to grow out long enough to do the braiding. Instead he'd had it cut very short, then shaved little trenches in it. It was an interesting solution, but not an effective one. From far away it looked like he might maybe sort of have cornrows if I squinted, but once he got within ten feet of me it was just sort of sad.

The requirements for membership were a little stringent for him, so he said he'd look around while he thought about it. He looked around downstairs for awhile, then left.

He came back about an hour later and headed straight downstairs. Someone who leaves and then comes back like that is almost always in league with Satan, so I glued myself to the monitor.

Something was up. He was pacing around, looking at boxes, checking out the cameras (though not as thoroughly as he might have) and in general becoming the living embodiment of the word "furtive".

He started tugging at his shirt.

I didn't know if he was going to whack off or stuff a box under it, but I didn't much care: I was not having it. Tony the beat cop had stopped in to say hi and check up a little earlier, so I knew he must be on the block. I gave him a call and asked him to stop by. I figured Tony doing a quick sweep would be enough to clear the guy out.

Seconds later, I put in a slightly more urgent call to Tony: The whacking had begun.

I had had enough. Normally I'll give someone a call on the Voice of God Mike and tell them to cool it, but screw that - the guy was beating off in my store. Fuck him.

Tony agreed. He said to call 911 and not let Bad Hair know anything was up. Done deal.

It felt weird to call 911 about a masturbator - I had visions of fires and floods and children in danger being put on hold as I said "Yeah, I have a clear view of him on the security camera..." and thought about how not an emergency the situation was.

But 911 did not mind. I gave the dispatcher a description of the guy and our store location again and she said that police were already on the block and on their way.

A bizarre, disgusting race was now underway - would the police get there before he finished?

Bad Hair whacked away, then looked over his shoulder. Jesus, was he finished or had he been disturbed?

He started upstairs. Fuck! I came around the counter so I could follow him out and show the police which way he'd gone.

Bad Hair started for the front door - dammit! - and actually lit up a cigarette as he went. Now there's an "Alive with Pleasure" ad.

Fuck, he'd hit the front door. I charged forward to catch up and see if he was going to duck into an alleyway... and then the firm, disgusted hand of the Law landed on his shoulder. Tony and two other officers had made it just in time.

"This him, Ali?"

"Yeah," I said, "I've got him on tape."

And then Bad Man with Bad Hair was shoved (not so hard as to cause injury, but firmly enough to be satifying) up aginst the outside of the store and cuffed while the officers did a very effective combination of questioning and shaming.

Then they took him away.

I signed a complaint, pulled the security tape, and said hell yes I'd show up for any court date they wanted to give me. Vengeful? Perhaps, but it was also very satisfying.

As effective as the Voice of God mike is at sending whackers skittering back upstairs, I have had enough. Why should I let them get away with masturbating in public, or for that matter almost get away with it and think that they can come back later and try it again?

Jesus, public masturbation is a taboo you learn about when you're four years old - how do these grown adult fuckos drop it so easily? I have more respect for the dirtbags who try to steal boxes. At least they're planning to go jerk themselves in private.

There's a piece of equipment in our storage area. I'm fascinated with it because printed across the base are the words "IMPULSE SEALER". It is, of course, for sealing off items that have been newly shrink-wrapped, but lately I've been pretending it's not and it's become an increasingly large part of my behind-the-counter fantasy life. There are many, many people who need to have their impulses sealed, and for some reason they all end up at my store.

No more warnings. From now on whackers will be referred directly to the police.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 10-15-2002 at 05:01 PM.

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10-31-2002, 02:53 AM #36

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

Staff Meeting

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We've had an interesting development. I knew one was coming because a sign appeared at the store this weekend to the effect that all four locations would be closing early Wednesday for a special meeting.

This would be the Wednesday in question, or at least it was when the meeting started.

We all knew something was up because meetings are usually held on a store-by-store basis. Nobody could ever remember having a giant summit meeting before.

No one would tell us anything. Well, actually the manager and assistant manager of our branch told us that they hated the fact that they couldn't tell us anything, and they thought it was a suckola way to do business. They were correct.

It always amazes me when upper power echelons in a company tell staff that something's up but they can't know what yet and then are shocked - shocked! - when rumors start flying. Well, what did they think? You can't play "I've got a secret" and expect people to cheerfully play along when you have the power to fire them. If there's no information coming down from above, The People will use their best guesses to create information of their own.

In this case, it was a Big Deal that had Lots of Points to Work out and yeah, yeah, nothing could be said until everyone was absolutely sure, and I understand that. That said, I hope management understands why rumors were flying. I was remarkably successful, minutes before the meeting, in maliciously spreading the rumor that we had a new dress code involving orange jumpsuits.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Bob sold the store.

It's to a chain, sort of, though not to one of the big ones. I'm glad about that. It's a company that owns several small chains like ours, and also some weird stuff like shoe stores and tanning salons. We'll be keeping our name and, fortunately, our branch managers, but the central managers will be gone.

We're told that day-to-day operations and things like in-store music and our utter lack of a dress code will stay the same, but I'm going to maintain a gentle but healthy skepticism until I see it.

The new administrative managers - ours is named Gary - seemed fine, and remarkably calm given the facts that they'd only found out about their new jobs about an hour before and were now being stared down by about fifty clerks with creative hair.

So we'll see.

But at least for now, I am still not fired.

Ali Davis
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11-11-2002, 01:48 AM #37

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

I Seek the Keymaster

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I am no longer the Keymaster.

We all used to be masters of our own keys to the store. The thing about having the flexibility of hours that we did (and, for the time being, do) is that anyone could end up opening or closing on any given day. It just ends up being a pain in the ass if someone doesn't have a key, so pretty much everyone who's been trustworthy for a month or two gets one. (I got one after a couple of weeks. I think it was the occasion of my first flush of Video Clerk pride, rapidly followed by my first wave of fear that I might be a career video clerk.)

That is no longer the case. We'd been having some occasional problems with the burglar alarm going off overnight so Nick, the new owner, had Gary, the new whatever-he-is, change the locks. Nick then went out of town and Gary said that we would "discuss" who got keys when Nick got back.

Nick and Gary are apparently used to working with full-timers (everyone on our staff is part-time except the managers) and actually thought they could narrow the key thing down to two openers and two closers at most. Right. Between college schedules, holiday/semester breaks, and the various bands, improv groups and other assorted performances people are involved in, I'm amazed that the schedule gets made at all every week, let alone a schedule that can make sure that one of only four keys is always on hand.

Gary is not great at the scheduling. We just got our first one and many clerks are pissed. I'm not pissed, but it is an odd schedule. People didn't get the hours or shifts they were used to, and a few people have been scheduled for shifts they specifically said they could not work. But again, scheduling looks like a nightmare task. Maybe Gary will get the hang of it. If he doesn't, it certainly won't be for lack of helpful, pointed clerkly suggestions.

I feel sort of bad for Gary. He's been dropped into this situation and immediately had to make a hugely unpopular move. We're annoyed because it seems like the new ownership doesn't trust us, because nobody mentioned to the managers that their keys wouldn't be working anymore, and because until Nick gets back we have to wait for goddamn Gary to show up before we can open or close the store.

Friday morning I spent half an hour waiting on the sidewalk in front of the store. This one wasn't Gary's fault - there was some sort of traffic tie-up - but it was still hard not to be absolutely murderous by the time he got there. I had made a resolution to reserve judgement on the ownership change and try to be friendly to Gary, but by the time I had spent a full 30 minutes meditating on the fact that if I'd had my own key I'd have been warm, on-schedule to open, and not so fully occupied with trying to find the spot on the sidewalk with the least amount of pigeon shit, I'll admit that I had fallen down a bit in my self-imposed task. By the time he jogged up and asked if I'd been waiting long I gave him a look so full of steaming hot death that he pretty much gave up on chatting. I felt bad, but not bad enough to make polite employee banter.

He was less late on Saturday, but still late enough to eat into my set-up time. I dislike having to rush my store set-up, and I dislike having to wait outside with my early-morning porn customers even more. When I hit the lock in the morning they stream towards the door from all directions, so I know that even the ones who haven't been out on the sidewalk with me have been waiting and watching me stand there helplessly in my own private Beckett tribute.

But we had yet another meeting this week and I think Gary is beginning to see our point on the key issue. We'll see.

We're all hedging our bets. I think we'd like it if things settled into a nice routine and we could keep our jobs but maybe have a more regular schedule of pay raises, but I don't think anyone really believes that. There have been a lot of classified sections of various papers lying around the store lately.

My first interview is this week.

Ali Davis
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11-11-2002, 02:35 AM #38

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

I Miss Mr. Cheekbones

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I haven't seen Mr. Cheekbones in months. Casey and I got to talking about it the other day and we both feel bad about it. I'd even had a twinge when I noticed that we'd sold off his favorite video. It was called Pee for Me.

Mr. Cheekbones was another customer whose name I learned early on. He usually came in with his headphones on and bopped as he walked around the store, singing along to the music in an odd falsetto range of his raspy voice. He liked porn - particularly peeing-for-each-other porn - and always asked when we were going to get some new kung fu movies, but really his tastes went across the board. He liked to try a little bit of everything, and was just as likely to rent Othello or the latest art house release as his trusty, much-rented favorite.

That made him unusual, but that wasn't why I learned his name early on: Mr. Cheekbones was a pain in the ass that I magically turned into a regular.

Mr. Cheekbones liked to prepay for his movies, which we usually don't do. It's not a huge deal, but it does require a special entry in the register and printing out a receipt to put in your drop at the end of the night. Now I could do it while blindfolded, shackled, and under the influence of a horse tranquilizer, but when I first started clerking prepayments bugged me. The prepayment itself bugged me, and then the fact that Mr. Cheekbones always mentioned his prepayment just after I'd checked out his movies and cleared my screen bugged me too. I'd have to ask for his account number again and it threw off my rhythm and now it seems like a very petty thing to be irritated with at all, but I think when I started I was an angrier clerk, or at least a more resentful one. (Hmm. I wonder if that means I've learned an important life lesson or if I've simply given myself over to despair.)

So I'd get annoyed when I'd see Mr. Cheekbones coming and he'd sense my distaste and be annoyed right back. We didn't like each other, and we kept not liking each other for a week or two.

Then one night he bopped up to the counter and chose David's register instead of mine. David was an even newer clerk than I was, so I gave him a friendly warning.

"That's Mr. Cheekbones," I said, "He likes to prepay."

And suddenly Mr. Cheekbones broke into a huge grin. He was a regular. I knew his face, his name and his preferences. A regular.

After that, we were buddies. We joked at the register, and talked, however briefly, about movies. One night he was checking out new tapes and I told him that the tapes he'd checked out before were due that day. He raced home, swearing he'd be back before we closed. I'd said he was never going to make it, but he stunned us all by doing it. He made it back to the store, sweating and wheeling his bike, with just minutes to spare. I clapped when I saw him coming.

He also had a pride about the way he paid: bills, not change. Once - only once - he had to pay for a movie with a handful of quarters and dimes, and he was furious with himself. It wasn't a big deal - we don't mind taking change for a $2.10 charge - but he kept saying, over and over, "You know me. I don't pay with change. You know me. I'm not the kind of guy who pays with change." He never did again, or at least not with me.

But we'd been seeing less and less of him for a while, and he wasn't looking too good. He didn't bop, he didn't chat, and he leaned on the counter like he was exhausted.

Once he came in with an awfully small dressing over a wound. Casey and I both thought it looked like he'd been shot. We're no experts, but still.

I don't know what happened, but somewhere in there he got his account cancelled. There's an outstanding charge of about $180 on his account, which usually means someone checked out movies and never brought them back.

Somewhere in there his life took a slide, and I hope he can make it back.

Wherever he is, I hope he has his headphones on.

Ali Davis
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11-23-2002, 08:56 PM #39

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

My Day in Court

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This is my own fault. I slacked off on updating (general business and some actual freelance work came up) and now I have to write about the many things that have happened with the curse of perspective. I'll try to stave it off as best I can.

Thursday the 14th was my court date for the whacker. We had to be there a little before 9. Megan, my manager, was nice enough to pick me up and drive me there. I hadn't had quite enough sleep the night before and I barrelled out of the apartment having remembered to do everything but eat breakfast, so I nearly wept for joy when I discovered that Megan had also been nice enough to pick me up some orange juice and a blueberry muffin. Empathy: the hallmark of an excellent manager.

We actually had a pretty good time: Megan had a mix CD playing, and while we must forever agree to disagree on the joys of Aqua, she did have some excellent non-dance Swedish music. We were a little early, so we chatted, caught up on the paper, and listened to the song that she used to torture customers with back in her clerking days before heading in. It was impressive.

Security tape in hand, we went through the metal detectors (People, for chrissakes. We all know the drill now. We're going to be having our metals detected for quite some time to come. Have your goddamned keys and your goddamned change and your goddamned giant metal belt buckles OFF YOUR PERSON AND READY TO PUT IN THE LITTLE BASKET. Must we really act like it's a surprise every time? I would ordinarily have been willing to cut people slack on that point, assuming that perhaps they are unfamiliar with airports or courthouses or are from foreign lands where people aren't quite so jumpy about being blown up [Are there any of those left?], but my friend Sheila the lawyer says that she used to routinely watch people be surprised about having their metals detected before court in the morning and then, coming back from their lunch break, be surprised all over again. I realize that in a way that must be a nice way to live, but for the sake of the rest of us, PLEASE WAKE UP.) and found our courtroom.

Our courtroom was the one for misdemeanors and it was packed to the gills. Megan and I only got seats when we explained to the bailiff who was trying to throw us out that we were actually involved in a case and not just hanging out. The seats were a mixed blessing. We had a good view and reasonable physical comfort, but we also had someone in the very near vicinity who smelled a lot like stale urine. No, a LOT like stale urine. I was very attentive during our time in court, but there was a renegade part of my brain that would not stop trying to figure out who it was. I had it narrowed down to either the woman on my left or the guy in front of me, but afterwards Megan said it was the guy on her right. Though I was happy to have the mystery solved, I was vaguely horrified to realize that the woman on my left and the guy in front of me may well have had their suspects narrowed down to me.

9am hit, the judge arrived, and suddenly we were whipping through cases like nobody's business. Megan and I were out of there by 9:30, and there were easily 15 cases in front of us. Most of them were dismissed because the accusers hadn't shown up. Bang, dismissed. I couldn't believe it, but then I realized it was pretty efficient. Clear out the chaff so that the people who are serious about it get more time from the court system down the road. (Marshall Field's, we noticed, does not fuck around when it comes to shoplifting. They had a guy stationed there whose whole job seemed to be showing up as the accuser.)

A couple of people pled out, a few more no-shows, the woman on my left (who, for the record, did not smell like pee) asked to wait a few minutes because her lawyer had stepped out and not come back, and then there was a mini-drama: three teenaged boys had their case (trespassing? Harrassment? I can't remember) dismissed because their (female) accuser hadn't shown up, but the judge ordered them to all stay the hell away from her anyway. I was mulling over whether the accuser had been afraid to show up or if hijinks had just gotten out of hand and she didn't really want to press charges or what when the whacker's name was called.

Megan and I went up, but the whacker was nowhere to be found. I wasn't too surprised: his address on the police report was in Michigan and I hadn't seen him in the courtroom and it was, let's face it, a pretty humiliating charge.

The DA seemed pretty happy that someone who wasn't just a paid store representative had actually shown up. He put a warrant out on the whacker, told us it might be a while before we heard anything, and off we went.

Megan and I agreed that it had been an extremely interesting morning and wondered if they'd ever actually catch him. I was just delighted to have been on the clock for it.

Ali Davis
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11-23-2002, 09:22 PM #40

Ali Davis
Working on it.
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 341

The New Overlords Are Neither Merciful Nor Just

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I had this Monday off.

I walked in on Tuesday morning to find that Megan had been fired.

Well, technically she'd been "downsized," but the net effect was still the same.

It was incredibly weird - she'd put up one last note about busting holiday shoplifters before getting the news, and then she was gone.

Jeremy, once our assistant manager, is now the manager. He's a good guy and will handle it very well, but it isn't quite the way he'd wanted to get promoted.

Megan, by the way, will be fine. She's a writer and this might just be the shove from Fate that she needs to get going on the life she really wants. On the other hand, she'd been at the store for four years and had worked her way up from clerking. It would have been nice if the New Masters had taken that into consideration.

My understanding is that Megan, having been given a bunch of new responsibilities what with upper management gone and all, had asked for some more money. Instead she was told that we'd be getting a new software system that would eliminate many of her duties and she would no longer be needed.

The decision came from Nick, the new owner, so nobody can quite decide how to treat Gary. Gary has been friendly but extremely and understandably nervous all week.

More changes are, reportedly, on the way.

The new software system will usher in a new way of doing things. Some of them, like the addition of a drop box, will make our customers happy, but I don't think most of them will.

We will no longer allow customers to take IOUs, and we will no longer allow customers to sign up for memberships without a credit card.

In other words, we will be doing our best to prune off our customers with lower incomes. The credit card thing is especially harsh. I do realize that the ones who sign up without cards are statistically a little more likely to be a problem down the road, but I always liked the fact that we didn't tar everyone who didn't have a credit card with that same brush.

We have people come in from all over town, incredibly far away in some cases, because we're the only store that will give them a membership. Most of them are good customers. What are they supposed to do now?

Even though it means that most of our bigger pains will be eliminated, most of the clerks don't like it, and we're all fairly shaken about Megan getting yanked, and yanked so suddenly.

I spent much of Tuesday ratting out the Overlords and indeed, I'm continuing to do so.

It's been a weird, sad week. More to come.

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Last edited by Ali Davis on 11-25-2002 at 02:59 AM.

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