For my next trick, I'd like to discuss an event that happened right at the tail end of my high school career. This one actually doesn't have that much to do with dating, but it's still a pretty great example of the kind of anomalies that follow me around.
So it's the summer before my freshman year of college, right? And what else would I be doing, besides living it up and trying to get as much partying in as possible before I go to big kid school... right?
Well, no. Not really. Instead, I was spending anywhere between 38-45 hours per week inside a movie rental place, making $6.25/hour. Now, there seems to be a certain urban legend that follows movie rental places around - about the occasional customer accidentally returning, uh, illicit materials in movie boxes instead of what they actually rented. Movies you can't get in Oklahoma.
Well, it DOES happen. It happened. More specifically, a tape of men who prefer the company of other men got returned... inside a Spanglish box.
Yup. The kind of movie you can't get in Oklahoma. THAT kind of movie you can't get in Oklahoma.
So what do we do? Well, I'm the youngest person there - at 18 years old - and even the oldest person is only something like 24. So what do you THINK we did? We joked about it. Constantly. I mean, we were on the clock too, so we did try and figure out what account the movie was actually rented on - but there was a problem.
There was a husband and wife listed on the account.
THAT was a phone call that NOBODY wanted to make. What if the wife picks up the phone?! I mean, I guess we could have just said the wrong movie got returned and left out the specifics, but obviously we weren't thinking clearly. Frozen by indecision, we did nothing... for about a week. That's when the saga ended - the actual Spanglish tape belonging to the store showed up in the drop box, with a note rubber banded around it. Blah blah blah, my friend played a joked on me, sorry about that, call me if you have any questions. Feeling pity, I voided the late fees that had accrued. I even left a note on the account - "Voided late fees, felt sorry for the guy."
So that's it, right? Pretty much, anyway. We moved on with our lives, getting back into our routines of re-shelving movies and staring at tacky counter tops. I started college, once again the scared little freshman, wandering from building to building, using a map to find my classes. All was well in the world. I had classes, I had my friends, and I had a job I liked... albeit a poorly compensated one.
One night, one of my professors came into the store. I was excited to see him - he was one of my favorites, and naively I thought - how cool is it to see a professor outside of class? It was like seeing some kind of quadrupedal animal walk on its hind legs. Amused with myself, I went ahead and pulled up his account as he and his wife browsed the store - I don't know why. I mean, it was a boring job. Sometimes we plugged names in just to see if they were real people.
That's when I saw it.
"Voided late fees, felt sorry for the guy."
Yup. One and the same. What do you do in a situation like that? Surely you don't bring it up. It probably would have been more awkward for him than for me - I mean, come on, this dude didn't even bring the right tape back into the store himself - he wrapped a sheet of paper around it like you would a ransom note.
So I did what I was raised to do in my family - I completely ignored it. To be honest, I DO think he put two and two together, and figured out that I had been present for the entire ordeal... but he never said anything.
And yes... I did get an A in that class.
xoxo
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