True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [17]
It would take him hours, and he usually got something wrong and had to go back down. We actually debated saying screw it and letting the nephew, who was of normal intelligence, go downstairs to expedite things, but our manager nixed it.
Finally he'd get back upstairs. The nephew would help the checkout go smoothly; his job was to make the world easier for the two to negotiate.
Then we got to the uncle's half of the relationship: He had the money. He had all the money, and what's more, he knew it was the source of his power and kept a pretty tight rein on it. Occasionally the nephew would pick out a video from upstairs, but his uncle had the account, so he had to check it with him first.
The whole thing freaked all of us at the store out very, very badly.
There were a lot of worried clerkly notes on the file. We didn't know what was going on, just that it was creeping our shit. Were we supposed to do something? There was an ongoing debate as to who was taking advantage of whom.
I served the Symbiots several times and, though nobody at the store agrees with me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a sexual relationship. I'm even pretty sure that they really were uncle and nephew. I think they had somehow discovered that they were both gay and formed an interesting team -- separately, they couldn't get porn, but together they were unstoppable.
Unfortunately, sometimes our mentally challenged customers cover so well that at first glance they come off as dirtbags. It's hard, in a quick transaction, to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely confused about the rules and someone who's trying to get around them. I usually slip a note on the file suggesting that the customer in question may need some extra assistance, but there's only so much that can do.
It can get frustrating, and I worry that I'm not doing enough. That's why I try to do my best: at least that way whatever else happens, at the end of the day I can rest secure in the knowledge that I have done all I can to make sure that every adult has an equal shot at renting Fuck Pigs 5.
Scandal Rocks the Video Store
You may be wondering how to scandalize a bunch of jaded porn clerks. I'll give you a hint: it's not with porn.
S. was a weird clerk to work with. For one thing, he was really into '80's hair bands. Also Nickelback, which only really became difficult after, say, the third consecutive round on the CD player. I didn't really mind that so much, though, because not only did S.'s presence drop me down to the rank of second oldest clerk at my store, it also meant that I was only the second least funky. Our store is sort of aggressively funky, but I still felt better being knocked out of the top slot.
But that wasn't the really weird thing. We all have our musical quirks, and tolerate each other's pretty well. What was weird was S.'s Superclerk persona. Like the rest of us, he wasn't at the video store bucking for a management position. He was a computer programmer, having recently graduated from DeVry ("Oh," said my mother, "Then he's really just sort of a programmer.") and was looking for a job. The store was pretty cool about keeping him working five shifts a week with the understanding that he'd drop the job with very little notice once one of his interviews paid off.
So he made no secret of being on his way out, but insisted on playing Superclerk. Actually, he was really more HallMonitorclerk. He'd automatically check the clock to see if other people were on time for their shifts -- and in fact he'd comment on it if I were only on time instead of a few minutes early. Every time I relieved him he'd gleefully show me how many sales he'd made, even though we're not on commission or anything. Clerks don't really do sales except in the sense that we accept money for purchases -- we don't push anything.
He'd always bitch when his shift was slow, saying he'd rather keep busy, and took careful notice of who was not as particular as he was with their cleaning