www.improvisation.ws/mb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4475
Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001 Posts: 261 Default True Porn Clerk Stories The other day I realized, as a cold claw of pure fear squeezed my frantic heart, that I have been working as a video clerk for ten months. This is a job that I took on a temporary basis for just a month or two until freelancing picked back up and I got my financial shit in order. It has been a test of patience, humility, and character. It has been a lesson in dealing with all humankind, including their personal bodily fluids. Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001 Posts: 261 Default Tae Bo A guy came up to the counter a few days ago and asked me if "Tae Bo" was in. I explained that we don't carry exercise videos and he said no, no we had it - he'd seen the box downstairs. A lot of porn movies do ape titles - "David Cop-a-Feel" was my all-time favorite - but not as many as you'd think. Most follow a pattern: B N, where A is the race of the participants (optional), B is the sex act or kink - sometimes this gets astonishingly specific - and N is the number of the series. Thus you get "Blow Bang 25" or "Asian All-Anal Action 15". The "Little White Chicks, Big Black Monster Dicks" (note intriguing combination of race and fetish) series has some of the most offensive cover art I've ever seen, not because of the sexual content but because it's incredibly racist. The little white chicks look at you demurely over their shoulders while surrounded by scowling African-American men. The men are repeatedly referred to as "monsters" ("monster dicks" itself doesn't bother me because it merely implies that said dicks are monstrously large, but referring to men themselves as monsters is another story) and their faces are actually mounted on cartoon animal bodies. There's no way in hell you could put that cover on, say, a book and not get your store burnt down, and perhaps rightly so. But my well-meaning liberalism can pretty much go screw itself, as the series is cheerfully (and heavily) rented by all races. I can't find it in the computer, but that's not unusual - deliberate misspellings are common in porn. That, plus the inevitable similarity of titles makes it a real pain in the ass to look things up. Does the customer want Black Ball, Blackball, Black Balled, Blackballed, Black Balls, Blackballs, Black Ballers, BlackBallers, Black Ballz, Blackballz, Black Ballerz, or BlackBallerz? And does he want the one in the gay section or the one in the straight section? The Zen lesson of my job is this: just because I do not want to be a video clerk doesn't mean I shouldn't be the best possible video clerk I can be. There's no way to just pop up a partial alphabetical list of titles, so you have to pick a likely starting point and then flip through entry after entry. Los Angeles Join Date: Feb 2001 Posts: 261 Default Lube Warning All of us abuse the hand sanitizer. I know that over-the-counter antibacterial products are bad. I know that it actually develops hideous resistant strains of bacteria. I even did the high school biology experiment where you put penicillin in a petri dish of E. Coli, then watch the zone of inhibition get smaller and smaller as the bacteria learn to eat the stuff for breakfast. I know it is bad, and I don't think it should even be legal to sell it. All of my fellow clerks agree with me, but we all abuse the hand sanitizer. They cough wetly into their palms right before handing me change. They forget about the security cameras downstairs and pick their noses with wild abandon and astonishing force. Still, the only thing that realy freaks me out is the semen. Well, OK, the lubricant freaks me out too, but I'm pretty sure that's because of the implied presence of semen. I use it so much that I lose all finger traction and can't open our plastic bags. I've had days when I've used it so much that I can't even make fingerprints on the glass countertop. It freaks me out, but the thought of not using it is worse. For the real addicts (I'm convinced that porn is like alcohol: some people can stop at just one every now and then, some people just binge on weekends, and some people get genuinely, horribly addicted) the reptilian brain kicks in. They hit the magic portion of the tape and they're done. They pop out the tape and slam in another one, and the next day the stack comes back, unrewound and covered in goo. Repeat offenders get a note on their file that says "LUBE WARNING". The first time we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time we hand him the tape, the Windex, and the paper towels and tell him to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter. It astonishes me that someone could actually forget to clean off his sticky and/or slippery tapes, but what amazes me even more is that people actually have the balls to argue with us about it. They will actually claim that the spooge in question was missed by both the clerk that checked it in and the clerk that checked it back out, and that they figured what the hell, they'd go ahead and play it, even though it was covered in gel. One guy brought back a DVD with a big white thumbprint of come on it. The clerk couldn't have checked the tape out to him that way because the serial number is on the front. The guy still tried to protest that sure, maybe he'd picked it up and looked at it but - "Sir," I said, "It's your THUMBPRINT. I hate it when people argue, but I understand why they do. I don't think there should be any shame in masturbating, but I do think there should be shame in expecting someone with whom you are not very, very close to deal with a wad of your spooge. I think they get all defensive because in that moment, they realize it too, but I think there's more to it than that. One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching. Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus. The polite fiction of the porn section is that, while people do generally use porn for the purpose of masturbation, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. When it becomes all too clear to everyone involved that said customer did, in fact, not only lube up, watch the tape, stroke himself to orgasm, and then grab the goddamned thing without even taking the basic courtesy of washing his goddamned hands first, we all get uncomfortable. On the other hand, he gets angry because he's ashamed of something that was entirely avoidable and his own fault. I'm supposed to keep my temper even though I've just put my hand in a wad of his semen. The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at nine, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies' worth of time, then returns them before four to get the matinee special. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. I just hope to God there's been a hand washing between him and me. I think there is, because his tapes are always clean, but it still gives me the shivvers and sends me straight to the hand sanitizer. The over-friendliness itself is creepy, as is the way he sort of doesn't blink enough and doesn't know that most business transactions don't really involve sustained eye contact. He just plunks a wet bag on the counter and we have to reach in and get the tapes. You know that initiation ritual in Flash Gordon where the guy has to stick his hand way, way down a hole and usually it's fine but sometimes there's a venemous bea...
|
http://csua.com/feed/