The Back Room - RTOTD #860

Day 860

During college, I went through a series of typical bullshit retail jobs. Except that mine were actually on the moderately cool end (well, as cool as a retail gig could really get) of that spectrum. I didn't work in clothing stores or a candy store or shoe store or anything like that. No, I got to spend the end of highschool and most of college in music stores, record stores, movie stores and arcades. It was actually pretty not horrible for someone making $4.35 in 1998 or whatever the fuck minimum was back then.

I would work at a record store and volunteer to take out the trash (which consisted of a couple bags of plastic shit and some cardboard boxes) just to grab a smoke in the back hallways of the mall and then bang on the back door of the arcade before heading back, so that I could pop in and get blazed with my friends working there before trudging my way back in to sell Britney Spears records to idiot teenage girls, while trying to convince them that Speak No Evil's first record was probably one of the best grunge-inspired hard rock albums on the shelves.

I would play games like John Cusack in High Fidelity (a few years before that movie even came out) where I'd see how quickly I could sell out of the 5 copies in stock of Muse's first album when nobody knew who the fuck they were by playing them at the right times or counting the number of times I had to say "The label didn't release a cd-single of that. But the whole album is actually pretty good".

But I kinda had an issue with lying to people. I'd tell people when a record sucked. And I guess that's why I wasn't cut out for corporate record stores. But if I would have gotten commission at that gig, I would have made 4x as much at that job than my bullshit minimum wage salary actually paid. I could sell ice to an eskimo and not only would he like it, he'd come back and get a different flavor ice the next week.

I'd spend 95% of my shift smoking in the office of the arcade, occasionally glancing at the security monitors and getting pissed when some idiot kid smacking a machine because he was forcing me to put down my smoke and my beer to go out and fix whatever he probably broke in the first place. But it was only 1 or 2 of us at a time all the time, and we'd have long-running competitions on who could avoid letting kids actually cash in the tickets from the 2 or 3 ticket-shitting machines the arcade had for their 50-ticket plastic dinosaur or army men or whatever.

I never did quite understand why they even had that prize counter, other than just for appearances. I guess the owners really wanted it to look like Kennywood. Because that was really drawing people in. The pink fluffy teddy bear that nobody was ever going to win. That was the draw. Not the giant Super Mega Street Fighter XIV Turbo or Tekken fucking 47 or whatever other game was placed right in the front of the arcade. Nope. It was the prizes from playing 799073249 games of skeeball. Sure.

But the best was working in a Blockbuster. Yeah, I had to wear fucking khakis and a polo shirt every day. I couldn't just wear the cheap button-up hanging loose over my t-shirt like the arcade or the record store t-shirt or anything. But I loved that place. If for only 2 reasons.

The first reason is that I got a shitload of free movies to watch and I really became a movie freak because of working for that place. It was great. Free rentals, taking new stuff home before anyone else was able to rent it, and a few other perks. It was great.

But the 2nd reason is the reason that I loved that job. The best way to put it would be to call it "the bait and switch". Now, I guess that most of you have been in a blockbuster before. It's stuffy and corporate and most of the people there are worse than Best Buy employees where they swarm you when you walk in and the minute you have a question, it's like cockroaches when you flip on the lights; they scatter and disappear. I kinda tried to not do that. I'd say hey to people walking in or give a nod when walking around. But mostly leave people alone.

Believe it or not, but there was a time when I was actually a person that was moderately suited for dealing with the general public. 4 years of retail fixed that problem.

So while I was always wandering and leaving myself mostly available and trying to seem as approachable as humanly possible for someone that was not as horrible of a human being as I am now, but still kind of a dick, I had an experience that would recur far too many times during my stay in the movie rental business. This must have happened on a half dozen occasions over a 6 or 10 month period and each time, I'd try to find a more clever way to respond. But I still love my first response the most. Here's how it went:

I'd be walking around the store and doing my best to keep the "I want to murder every single one of you" expression off my face when a middle-aged white guy would come up to me. (Every single time it was a middle-aged white guy) But he didn't like walk up to me in that way that people walk up to a sales associate in a store. Instead, they would slide up next to me and never make eye contact. The first time this happened, it was quite disconcerting. This guy was standing there looking down at a rack of movies when, as I walked past, he stepped back into my path and never moved his eyes. Forced to a stop, I was about to just apologize (even though it was his fault) and walk around him when he spoke in a low voice.

Guy: "Hey, can you let me into the back room"

I was confused for a second. But only about a half a second, while I processed this and a bell rung inside my brain.

Me: "The back room?"

Guy: "Yeah. I wanna go back there"

This guy still hadn't looked up at me or even glanced in my direction. It was like he had found his definition of "discrete" from watching horrible spy movies. Was he going to drop a briefcase next to me next and wait for me to set mine down so that we can grab each others briefcases next? Or maybe there was some microfilm that is super important somewhere? The only thing missing was a trench coat and a low-slung hat.

Me: "Umm... *glancing around* sure?"

Guy: "thanks"

I walked in front with him following for about 15 feet before we reached the door to the back of the store. It was marked "RESTRICTED" and had a single small window in the top of it. I had to fight the urge to begin laughing already.

I stepped to the door and glanced around again. The guy still had his eyes downcast and wasn't apparently studying the distinct texture of the carpet or possibly his bellybutton. But that was about to change.

I pushed the door to the back room open slowly and as he heard the creak of the door, his eyes rose. I opened to reveal a mostly-empty room with a number of boxes along the back wall, and a conference table in the middle of the room.

Me: "Here you go. So that's some boxes and right there? Right there we have a conference table. It's kinda cool, right? And over there we have the office and a door to the bathroom. And in that corner there, right there, that's where we hang our coats."

The guy's face turned just shy of the brightest red I could have imagined without me believing that his face was about to morph into a Coca-Cola can. Quickly, he shuffled towards the front of the store and to the counter. He almost broke into a run at first, but forced himself to not do it. But if his embarrassed downcast eyes could have gone lower without starting to flip back up backwards, I bet they had. He was out the door from the back wall of the store in under 5 seconds.

I let the door close and lost my shit. Catching the eye of the other person on duty, she knew exactly what had happened almost immediately.

Her: "Back room?"

Me: "Back room!"

And we spent the next 15 minutes losing our minds laughing.

For that reason and that reason only, to embarrass the middle-aged white guys looking for Porn in a blockbuster, I loved that job probably more than even getting stoned for 8 hours in an arcade or listening to a shitload of awesome music that nobody had ever even heard of in a record store for hours on end and being paid for it.