My work load last night was not very high. So the question wasn’t asked many times. I counted 12 in a 5 hour work night. My hours have been mysteriously cut since I gave my letter of resignation. I may have been a little too professional, when giving 4 weeks notice in writing. I guess deep down I felt bad for the owner, even though he’s a jerk.

My store releases movies before the release date. I’ll be cashing in that card when I leave as a revenge for the stuff I had to deal with.

What? I hear someone murmuring about how watching movies all day is an easy job.

I do agree. My job would be amazing if that was true. Although, I’m not professing a hard job, I am saying that it’s not without it’s sad moments.

Here’s one such instance:

Week 2 on the job, and I was rising to the top of the employee pool. I show up fifteen minutes early, and do the best job I can. I have this odd sense of integrity when it comes to where I work, I show up early and I always make sure things are in order before I begin to settle into my work routine. I clean, I check the shelves, I organize, and then I count my drawer and start taking customers. If there was a hall of fame for clerks, I’d be right next to Dante and Randal….or maybe not. The point of that is to lay down a foundation of how I was such an idiot to agree to the following.

The phone rang and it was the owner. He told me that I needed to clean the Adult Section. Our adult section is updated every Tuesday with a box, I kid you not, a box of adult movies. We’re talking anywhere between 25 and 100 movies every Tuesday, and it does vary slightly. In light of new releases he asked me to clean the porn section. So I asked if I should vacuum or something, and he said to vacuum, then get the glass cleaner and wipe down all the cover boxes and clean the dust off the shelves.

I agreed.

I went behind the red curtain and zipped up my hooded sweatshirt up to my eyes and figured this was just the bottom rung of a corporate ladder that I’ll climb in the future. It wasn’t, but I tell myself such things to make me feel better. I began with the vacuum, and I could feel the owner laughing at the situation from his home office where he monitors our behavior through 15+ cameras in the store. I turn the vacuum on and *BOOOM* the front end explodes into fragments of plastic and dust. The corner of the porn section now covered in years of dirt and mold build up, because unknowingly I turned on the vacuum for the first time in two years!

I should have quit then, but instead, I picked up the pieces, and worked around the customers that were too shy to look up and see what was going on, or maybe they were just too excited about the latest and greatest four ninety nine sale. I cleaned up the vacuum mess, and went to get a broom and swept the messes on the floor, and that wasn’t half bad. I figured I was still safe on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, so I felt good.

I then began cleaning the shelves individually. That was not fun. Those things had not been cleaned in years and the dust was piling up, and some of the boxes were so greasy and oily that I was afraid to pick them up. A combination of dirt and grease and the smell of ammonia all played tricks on my nostrils. Three hours later and the porn section sparkled with a shine that I could be proud of.

I heard the phone ring, and my coworker yelled from the counter, saying that the boss wanted to speak to me.

I picked it up and heard his strong accent telling me that I needed to make sure that the shelves were cleaner. He instructed me to take down all the dvd boxes and place them on the floor, systematically cleaning the shelves from back to front, and not just the once over that I gave them. He said that there’s extra paper towels in the back room.

I lost all my sense of nobility and integrity.

I returned to the red curtain, my eyes fixed on the floor, as I entered my dreamland of cleaning.

It’s funny because I would be growing up with friends and joking about when I turned 21 I would buy all the porn in the world. At the age of 16, unfortunately porn was a commodity that I couldn’t afford. I never got into the internet for those purposes, but I’m sure it would have just been easier to do that. The irony is that at age 23, I would be surrounded by porn, and my tastes were so desensitized that I couldn’t even look at the boxes without distaste. I know that will mark me as a pervert, but just think about it in the most primitive terms and see the irony found within this situation, please?

8 months later and I get a phone call last night.

“Jorge. I need you to clean the porn section. There’s extra towels in the backroom.”

No thanks.

“What?”

No Thanks Sir.

“Jorge. I’m not asking, I’m telling.

No thanks.

“Just dust then.”

No it’s ok.

“Fine. Is it slow?”

Yeah. I’m pretty bored here.

“Play a new movie”

Already did. I’m playing Jackass now.

“No, that’s bad.”

So.

“Fine. Make sure you clean.”

Whatever.

I hung up the phone and my coworker was busy putting movies away, and that’s when we had a flood of regulars come in. They asked my new coworker if she knew this title with a girl on the cover, blood stained, and she was lost. My coworker stuttered to find her thoughts, then passed them to me.

You want “High Tension”.

That sums up my career in the video store. Think about it….