True Porn Clerk Stories (12 page)

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 again to say that men and women are fundamentally different -- 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 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.

Do Not Feed the Clerks

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 occurred 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 had some sort of goods-for-services thing going on over there too. 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 head 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.

Home Is the Sailor

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 foreign 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 could'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 an after-hours 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 seething with rage over 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 fewer than half of 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 shelf. You people don't know what you're missing.