The one thing that makes my job a little on the active end of the spectrum is the Return factor. When people return movies they drop them into a hole in our counter. The amount of dvd’s that are in the box pile up for a long time, and eventually they start slipping out of place since there is a lot of them. In considering this, you have to return movies as they are dropped in the slot, otherwise they build up into a disaster and you have to rethink your options and get up off of the chair and start putting movies away. Let’s say you don’t put the movies away, and you just let them build up. Then the customers that come in ask the stupid question, “Do You Have This In?” and you can say no, but they think you are lying. They are not considering the line that is building up while you plow through 300 returns to see if anyone returned the movie that they wanted, and then when you say no, they get mad at you. This is the stupid part of the job. The customer can be so smart in appearance, then drop the worst questions in the world.

My second notion on the returns is this: If you’re like me, and hate having to talk to the customer, then you return every movie as it comes in for return. So I am walking up and down the store several times a night, and even if there are customers browsing the shelves, I still put things away, and that’s something that I pride myself on. I like to put things on the shelf so that people don’t ask me anything. It’s not that I’m antisocial, it’s just that they ask the same question every time and I don’t feel like responding the same way to every single customer that walks into my store. So after all the smoke is cleared and I finish putting things away, I can then relax and sit in the only chair that we have in the store.

I can’t say as much for our newest coworker who left early after making some lame excuse about being sick, only after I told him that the store policy had been modified to have us put away returns as they come in. Lazy? I think so. This guy is not on the next schedule. Funny huh? I see a trend.