Danger is his middle name

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A Facebook conversation with pictures, names, and places blocked out. The author's fake middle name is Danger. "Quick question. Is it mandatory for every [name of store redacted] location to have at least one hot girl working there?"]

The brief answer to your question, good sir, is AW HELL NO. 

To give a more detailed answer: it's people like you who make my job difficult. At least once a day, some invariably male person asks me if I even play video games. (Answer: Yes.) Dudes ask me about my relationship status so often that I have an elaborate made-up boyfriend cover story in place, so I won't ever have to explain that I'm both single and totally not interested. (Someone asked me once what my boyfriend's job was. My fake boyfriend has a fake job.) Grown-ass men tell me LAFF RIOT stories about how bad their girlfriends / wives / random acquaintances who might be women / so on suck at video games, and then stand there and wait for me to laugh along with them. (Hahahaha nope.) Little boys stand right in front of me and tell their parents that they don't want to talk to me because "girls don't know anything about video games."

The implication in complaints like this is that the "hot girl" (READ: female employee) wasn't hired because of her knowledge and qualifications, but because "gamers" (READ: lowest-common-denominator douchebros who sometimes play video games) like "hot girls." Either the "hot girl" is taking the job from a "gamer," or she's there to trick "gamers" into spending more money.  

Our store management, self included, is majority women. (And our part-time chick is a lesbian, so good luck with that, bros! Ask her about her boyfriend's job.) We've all been working at the store for years, and we weren't hired on as tokens. Diversity in the staff down at the shallow end is important for any retailer, because women and other assorted non-bro types have money to spend, too. And yet, even if no women, gay men, anti-sexists, or gender rebels ever in the history of ever bought any games for themselves, if video game stores really did go ahead and hire otherwise unqualified female models to jockey their registers, it would still hurt their sales. 

Why?

A large chunk of the people shelling out all that money for those video games for the coveted men and boys age 12-to-21 set... are their moms.

WHOOPS FOR YOU!

A topical post

When you're at work at a retail store, you're kind of cut off from the world until you get home. (Unless you're one of those assholes who's constantly trolling Twitter on their phone.) So today, I was working with bossbro, and two of our repeat offenders came up to the counter.

"OMG," the one guy said. "Roger Ebert died today!" Which is terrible news, and news we had not been aware of. But then this guy said:

"PSYCH!"

Really, bro?

"Uhh, so is Roger Ebert dead or not dead?" we asked.

"Oh, no, he's definitely dead," he said. "I don't know why I said psych."

R.I.P. Roger Ebert. You deserve a better eulogy.

Real-life customer interaction, submitted without comment

"Why are you buying NBA 2K12 and 2K13?"

"YOLO."

Truth

For Lack of a Better Comic:

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A comic strip by Jacob Andrews from For Lack of a Better Comic featuring a guy working in a shop. 

REGISTER JOCKEY: Will that be all for you, sir?

CUSTOMER: Yep, that's it.

REGISTER JOCKEY: All right, have a great day!

CUSTOMER: You too.

Long pause. REGISTER JOCKEY becomes more and more depressed. Typical REGISTER JOCKEY behavior, basically.

REGISTER JOCKEY: ...Oh my God. I'm an NPC. ]

Badass story of badassitude

While my friend was reading this very blog, she killed a huge fucking cockroach with her bare hands. I'm gonna go ahead and say that gives me badass ranks by proxy.

Oh no! My gamer cred!

Gamers are jerks, and they love to spoil games for other people. The day after Bioshock Infinite came out, one of our repeat offenders pranced in and told me the ending, because he looked it up on Youtube and decided it was stupid. Back in December, someone spoiled Far Cry 3 for bossbro over the phone. Just called up the store two days after the game came out and opened with, "So, how about that ending to Far Cry 3 where blah blah blah?"

On behalf of media salespeople everywhere: THANKS, DOUCHE!

So it wasn't that unusual when today at work, a child walked up to me and told me the ending to Batman: Arkham City. I have yet to play Batman: Arkham City. In hindsight, it's kind of amazing that I didn't know the ending yet, since it came out a year and a half ago and I work in an environment where people are constantly shouting out the endings to things, with no concern for how it affects me.

"Well, thanks for that," I said to the kid. "I haven't even played that game yet."

"Umm, you work in a game store. Shouldn't you have played every single game ever made?" Also a common assumption about us lowly video game salespeople. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to play test Dora Saves The Mermaids, because I was too busy doing literally anything else. 

"I bet I know a ton of stuff about games you've never even heard of," I said. "Wanna know the ending to Dragon Warrior on the NES?" Surprisingly, he had heard of Dragon Warrior on the NES. He must have good parents.

"Oh, I played that once, it was fun. But I kept getting killed by slimes." 

"So you didn't finish it." He shook his head. "Do you want to know the ending?"

"Yeah, ok."

"You kill the Dragonlord, you get the princess, and then the game ends."

Pause.

"It was the 80s, they didn't have fancy endings." 

He didn't look very impressed. But whatever- I beat Dragon Warrior. Multiple times. I didn't get killed by no slimes. And it was fuckin' awesome.

 

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The starting screen for the American version of Dragon Warrior on the NES. Hurtmore! Hurtmore! Healmore! Thou art dead.]

Tellin' it like it is

When I got to work today for the closing shift, my boss had made a list in our Official Store Daily Records Book of all the stuff we had to get done today. The first one was "Alphabetize the Wii section" (impossible), followed by some inventory stuff and a list of the items we're supposed to be pushing right now. But by the time I got there, at 2 P.M., she'd only signed off on the completion of one task:

"Babysit adult loiterers."

Sounds about right.