True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [18]
He'd complain when he found little doodles on Post-it notes around the counter -- how could the night shift do these damned things when nearly every morning he came in to find the vacuuming below par? He'd get jazzed up about staff meetings for weeks ahead of time.
In short, S. was a nice guy, but an incredible pain in the ass.
A week ago Friday, I got a call at home from Matt, the guy who does all the scheduling. Would I be able to take an extra shift or two?
S. had been arrested.
In the seven months S. had been working at the video store, he had embezzled nearly six thousand dollars. And that's what they can prove -- my manager thinks it may have been more like ten thousand.
The managers were all furious -- they felt they had treated S. like part of the family and he had betrayed their trust. The reaction of the clerks was less visceral, but the same across the board: Wait a minute. If he was already stealing from the store, why did he have to be such a self-righteous prick about the cleaning assignments? It still doesn't make sense.
The bizarre thing is I don't think it was a cover. I'm pretty sure that in his own mind, S. was far and away the best clerk at the store. I don't even think he thought of what he was doing as stealing, and certainly not as grand theft. He was, after all, doing his thieving three bucks at a time.
It wasn't even a programming trick (thus adding credence to my mother's assessment). We're pretty sure he was just telling the customer the prices for their returns (which wouldn't be hard -- the same combinations come up a lot) and then zeroing out the numbers in the computer as though they had free rental cards. Then he just pocketed the overage at the end of his shift.
It wouldn't be hard, and actually the anal-retentive way the store handbook suggests counting out our drawers facilitates it.
On the other hand, it was really, really stupid. It's not like we don't have accountants. It didn't take all that long to notice that S.'s drops averaged anywhere from $50--$100 less than any other clerk working the same shift, or that he gave out way more free rentals than anybody else.
I can't believe they waited as long as they did to nail him.
But nail him they did. They had him arrested and cuffed right off the register in the middle of his shift. Pretty hardcore. Apparently his parents are paying back the money he stole so he'll have a misdemeanor instead of a felony on his record. It's tough to think of many things I'd want to do less than explain to my parents that I'd been arrested for seven months of petty theft.
So S. goes free and the store gets its money back. It's the remaining clerks, of course, who will end up taking the brunt of the fallout.
The upstairs security cameras, once aimed so that we had a good view of the hands and faces of people browsing the for-sale movies, have been re-aimed. Now they give a good view of the hands of the clerks.
I was so insulted by this that I considered walking right off the job. It's ridiculous. You can see our hands, yes, but it's not like you can tell if someone is zeroing out the prices on the computer screen. The thief-magnet sale racks are now only vaguely visible in the background. Incredible.
We also got a letter in our paychecks from Bob, the owner. It describes the arrest in lascivious detail, then has a message for the rest of us about how he's sure we're all great people with big plans for the future, but he will not hesitate to bust our asses if it turns out we're not.
So there's a bit of a clampdown. Everyone's afraid to give a good customer a break on, say, accidentally bringing up the wrong tag and getting the wrong movie because we know our free rentals are being gone through with a fine-toothed comb. The cameras are always pointed at us and the general managers call about fifteen times a day to make sure everything's OK.
On Tuesday Bob stopped by at 7 a.m. -- NOT to check up on me, mind you, just because he was in the neighborhood. But while he was there, how was everything