Why to work at a video rental store
There was a time, long ago when I worked in a video rental store. This was before DVDs were popular, but long after Beta-Max had been taken out to a field and shot in its stupid face. The store, which will remain unnamed (not that it exists anymore, but it sounds cooler if I don’t name it) was the kind of place that had a fantastically large budget which allowed better investment into marketing. Put the company’s name on the sign? No. We kept it simple with a red sign above the door proclaiming, “VIDEO” loud and clear to anyone who’s car broke down in front of the property, or if your car was wheelless and already up on blocks in front of the store.
When I went out to the interview with the flamingly homosexual soon-to-be-my-manager, I was hired on the spot mostly because I had the forsight to wear clothing that had been freshly washed and was free of wrinkles. Of course it is possible that my extensive training and work experience in the already booming rental industry may have helped give me an edge the other applicants lacked. Costume rental, after all, is very similar to video rental.
On the first day I was introduced to my coworker, who’s name escapes me, but I do recall that she was about 19 months old and had the grueling responsibilities of taking the kids movies from the kids rack and placing them in places around the store as dictated by a secret comunique from the store’s owner. Her mother also worked in the store and among her responsibilities were acting as if the secret pattern of movies layed about the store were an unknown to her. The only explanation is that there was something happening I was unaware of and customers would come into the store and decode these messages to take on to the next “Cell.” Apparently the covert operations ceased shortly after my arrival as my new coworker and her “Mom” were no longer visible.
After a couple of days I had gotten the whole routine of the business down to a 15 minute period right when I came in. Since my shift was the morning shift there wouldn’t be much to do once the 15 minutes of work were over. So I read novel after novel until one day I realized that it had somehow slipped my mind that I was surrounded by over 3,000 different movies that could be, at any time, popped into the “VCR” (as they called them in those days) and enjoyed by myself (and anyone who decided to stand directly outside of the door with a microwave bag of popcorn).
We also rented porn.
Of course in the state in which the store was located, it was illegal to show any movie that is PG-13 or R, NC-17, NC-18, NC-42, X-Rated, or stars Brendan Frasier. This rule was strictly obeyed to the letter of the law, by which I mean, once I had run out of G, PG, and PG-13 movies I moved on to the rest. Sometimes this resulted in me quickly jumping out of my chair and stopping the movie complaining to inform a customer that I was simply verifying that the video did work, and the late fees their son had incurred would be charged to their account.
We also rented porn.
Many different rental stores means many different ways of keeping their wares in good condition between the laborious trek from video store to home and back. The state of the art cases that we placed our videos into were top-of-the-line-olifactory-ensnaring devices. There is a veritble cornucopia of various smells that come back with rented videos. If you were to think of the largest possible number of smells that you think could possibly be created, multiply that by the number of stars in the galaxy, and then add to that the number of straight-to-video releases Dolph Lundgren starred in, you still wouldn’t be anywhere near the number of various scents the video cases we used were laden with upon return (as long as that number isn’t larger than 3,000). It was one of those things that happens where late into your career in this field, you find your self passing the cases close enough to catch a bit of the bouquet of the case, just in case someone had spilled perfume on it, even though that was never the case.
The fact that we rented porn isn’t an “exciting” topic so much as a source for lots of sheepish giggles and some good chortling, if you chortle, that is. How many people get to state with complete certainty that they have helped a war veteran who’s missing a large piece of his head, by reading the descriptions of all of the geriatric-pornography followed by him saying, “No, I’ve seen that one.” Or, who’s ever had a boss that says under his breath one day, “I love it when men wearing sweatpants go in to the porn room.” And who can forget the 10 year old kid who was going to “Pop a cap” in my “ass” if I “di’n't reco’nize” “where” “he” “from,” and let “him” into the porn “room.”