True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [39]
Jesus, public masturbation is a taboo you learn about when you're four years old -- how do these grown adult fuckos drop it so easily? I have more respect for the dirtbags who try to steal boxes. At least they're planning to go jerk themselves in private.
There's a piece of equipment in our storage area. I'm fascinated with it because printed across the base are the words "IMPULSE SEALER". It is, of course, for sealing off items that have been newly shrink-wrapped, but lately I've been pretending it's not and it has become an increasingly large part of my behind-the-counter fantasy life. There are many, many people who need to have their impulses sealed, and for some reason they all end up at my store.
No more warnings. From now on whackers will be referred directly to the police.
Staff Meeting
We've had an interesting development. I knew one was coming because a sign appeared at the store this weekend to the effect that all four locations would be closing early Wednesday for a special meeting.
This would be the Wednesday in question, or at least it was when the meeting started.
We all knew something was up because meetings are usually held on a store-by-store basis. Nobody could ever remember having a giant summit meeting before.
No one would tell us anything. Well, actually the manager and assistant manager of our branch told us that they hated the fact that they couldn't tell us anything, and they thought it was a suckola way to do business. They were correct.
It always amazes me when upper power echelons in a company tell staff that something's up but they can't know what yet and then are shocked -- Shocked! -- when rumors start flying. Well, what did they think? You can't play "I've got a secret" and expect people to cheerfully play along when you have the power to fire them. If there's no information coming down from above, the plebes will use their best guesses to create information of their own.
In this case, it was a Big Deal that had Lots of Points to Work out and yeah, yeah, nothing could be said until everyone was absolutely sure, and I understand that.
That said, I hope management understands why rumors were flying. I was remarkably successful, minutes before the meeting, in maliciously spreading the rumor that we had a new dress code involving orange jumpsuits.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Bob sold the store.
He sold it to a chain, sort of, though not to one of the big ones. I'm glad about that. It's a company that owns several small chains like ours, and also some weird stuff like shoe stores and tanning salons. We'll be keeping our name and, fortunately, our branch managers, but the central managers will be gone.
We're told that day-to-day operations and things like in-store music and our utter lack of a dress code will stay the same, but I'm going to maintain a gentle but healthy skepticism until I see it.
The new administrative managers -- ours is named Gary -- seemed fine, and remarkably calm given the facts that they'd only found out about their new jobs about an hour before and were now being stared down by about fifty clerks with creative hair.
So we'll see.
But at least for now, I am still not fired.
I Seek the Keymaster
We all used to be masters of our own keys to the store. The thing about having the flexibility of hours that we did (and, for the time being, do) is that anyone could end up opening or closing on any given day. It ends up being a pain in the ass if someone doesn't have a key, so pretty much everyone who's been trustworthy for a month or two gets one. (I got one after a couple of weeks. I think it was the occasion of my first flush of video clerk pride, rapidly followed by my first wave of fear that I might be a career video clerk.)
That is no longer the case. We'd been having some occasional