True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [29]
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,