Posted by Amanda Marcotte August 10, 2007 in Labor
At least you’re not a porn video clerk. Unless you are. (Hat tip.)
30 Responses to “Hate your job?”
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And I thought filling in for the mental & attentive lapses of lawyers and engineers was rough. (”Have you kept your inbox clean?”)
Well, it’s not pretty, but nothing in the Porn Video Clerk league.
Man, that’s old school. I remember reading that, what was it, three or four years ago? Still interesting stuff; I remember it being very thought-provoking for me the first time I read it.
Man, that’s old school. I remember reading that, what was it, three or four years ago? Still interesting stuff; I remember it being very thought-provoking for me the first time I read it.
Hey, I know that person! Sort of. I took improv classes at the theatre where she performed. She’s great.
Fortunately, I love my job! But I don’t sell porn.
I love that site. I’m a librarian, and her breakdown of customer “types” holds up amazingly well in that setting, too. We usually don’t have to wipe down books when they get returned, though.
This job would be great if it weren’t for the fucking customers.
Ok, I don’t work at a porn video store… but I do work at a peepshow, and some of those stories do sound remarkably familiar.
I love true stories like this about the travails of people in their occupations. Thanks for linking to it.
a job is a job, n’est ce pas?
Yeah, it’s great stuff. I think I’ve read the whole thing at least twice before.
Here’s Ali Davis’ livejournal.
I went into a sex shop that had a peep show once to buy unrelated to porn or peep show items, and I remember checking out and the stripper came rushing out of her booth or whatever and covering her breasts with her shirt and getting pissed because two guys were sharing a booth and that was against the rules. I felt bad for her, but was sort of startled at how blase the manager was, like that’s a nightly occurrence.
Oh my god, Amanda! Did it happen to be the Oasis Peepshow in Austin, Texas? Two of the girls at our peepshow used to work there!
Mothworm,
Speak for yourself
Worked at the State Library of Florida for 4 years, and our most consistant “patrons” were the correctional instituions. The musical chairs used to decide who got to open and check-in those boxes were rather interesting from a “what the hell did I do for you yesterday that justifies throwing you to the wolves today” point of view. Once we just dumped a big shipment in toto (as in: after opening the box, it was hastily closed and sent to the dumpster toute suite, with the items cleared in the computer w/o checking) because no one was going to actually touch the books to try and ascertain an itemized list of destruction.
While shelving corrections returns was a fascinating view of what people with lots of enforced downtime will read, it was also an argueably more fascinating (though scarier) view into what those same people will do to the books after they finish reading - Oh God, I hope after: if I had concrete proof it was before or during, I might have to remove parts of my brain with toenail clippers
I actually am a porn/sex toy clerk, but I haven’t had anything too horrible happen because I started working after we banned the guy that would touch female employees and even tried to drag one of them into the bathroom with him.
However, I did have one older (80ish) guy flash me his rubber underwear, which he seemed to be doing as a thrill because he went upstairs and showed them to another female employee.
Most the people who come into our store though are super nice. I’ve noticed that most of the creepers we have are men who come in frequently to get videos/magazines.
Man, if you get REAL bored, head on over to a porn shop and start striking up conversations with random people while they’re browsing the videos (obviously you don’t do this at your porn shop, just some random dump somewhere). Most people just mutter something at you and shuffle away, but every now and again it gets downright surreal.
Hey, is it me, or do most porn shops smell weird?
When I was a teenager I worked part-time in a neighborhood vid store with a pretty big porn “back room.” Most of the time it was no big whoop, but we did get the slimy cassette boxes and the boys younger than me who we had to kick out. None of the customers ever harassed me and we didn’t have flashers. We did have one patron who regularly brought his python along with him but no one really minded.
For me the occasional awkward moment — apart from renting “barely legal” bang flicks to the dads of my friends and acquaintances — was having to discreetly explain to moms with their kids in tow that there were huge late fees on their account because of “something” their husband had rented and not returned. That was always kinda tetchy.
I did it for a year after grad school for photography… They fired me because I wouldn’t clean the bathrooms. Check out the photos at my website, link on the left “i work in a sex shop…”
http://www.colerobertsonphoto.com
Porn shops creep me right the fuck out. There’s one right next to a music store I frequent, and I’m always afraid that someone I know will see me and think I’m going to the porn shop.
I became friends with a young lesbian couple i met in a porn shop once. We were the only ones around beside the clerk, and they had lots of questions about porn and toys. For some reason they asked me instead of the clerk. I helped them out as best i could, though my knowledge of toys is pretty limited.
Oh my god, Amanda! Did it happen to be the Oasis Peepshow in Austin, Texas?
God, that was like 8 years ago. I don’t remember. It was somewhere way up north, by Rundberg. By a gay bar, if I recall correctly. I usually don’t go to places like that—I prefer to go to Forbidden Fruit.
I worked in a fetish shop for a short time — rubber, leather, corsets, toys, etc. The oddest things always happened when people tried to return things: “it’s too big” “it’s too small” - when they were trying to return toys. We would always explain, we didn’t offer refunds or exchanges on such items. One customer got very upset and through his rubber toy at me and another clerk — very strange night…
I used to work at a magazine and cigar store. We sold every magazine you can imagine. At one point, we were selling more than a dozen different knitting magazines. The store was in a suburban section of town, so most of our patrons were fairly white bread.
What I couldn’t figure out was the guys who would buy porn there. Some of the magazines were extremely raunchy, with titles like “Pregnant Pussy”, “Family Heat”, and “Latin Snatch”. So why would you buy a magazine like that at a suburban magazine shop? Why not just drive 10 blocks to a sex shop, where the other patrons are also porn buyers, and where you won’t wind up buying your copy of “She-Male” from a 19 year old college girl?
Wow.
I didn’t read it all, but it brought back memories of college. I remember the caller that thought we could talk dirty to him because we rented the porn. Then there was the guy who rented and returned the same day, but was walking bowlegged when returning. The funniest was the exercise tape, “Bubba: Till it Hurts,” that kept getting misfiled in the porn section and really disappointing people.
If there is such a thing as the opposite of a hat-tip, I’d like to give you one. I just spent/wasted a solid half-hour entranced by those tales of porn clerkdom.
I once worked at a Tower that had a pretty decently large porn section. When I first started working there, it was a mess–books misshelved, put in backwards, out of order–so I organized the whole thing nicely.
Eight hours later, it was a mess. AGAIN. No matter how many times I re-organized it, by the next day it was trashed. It’s like the people who bought the porn were so ashamed of themselves that they took it out on the books.
PhysioProf- the opposite of a hat-tip is a wag of the finger. At least for the Colbertnation.
Been there, done that. One of my regular customers, believe it or not, was the spitting image of George Will, down to the floppy haircut, the little round glasses, and the sour little mouth. Whenever I checked a new porn title out to him, I had to stop myself from saying something like “I hope you enjoy Assmaster, Mr. Will.”
Then there were the ones who think I’ve seen every tape in the store, and ask my opinion on which porn title they should rent. Like I know the difference between Forrest Hump and On Golden Blonde. Usually I said “They both look good to me, ma’am. Why don’t you just get them both? I, uh, have a bathroom to clean.”
I don’t ahve any stories of my own, but I do have a second hand one a camp counselor told me once. He worked in a video store briefly in High School. One slow night a friend asked him to hold on to a cardboard cut out of Mr. Spock. So my counselor sets up the cardboard cutout near the register, but eventually Spock’s look got to him so badly he had to put it somewhere he couldn’t see it. This was a regular video store, so the porn section was curtained off. Of course he set up the cutout so that Spock was looking right at people who walked into the porn section. He didn’t rent a single porno that night. Customer would walk in and walk out looking utterly, utterly ashamed and confused. He described Spock as “a pillar of culture and restraint.” Eventually the only way my counselor and his friends could free themselves of Spock’s effect was to hang the cutout from the railroad trestle.
I had a friend who worked at Books-A-Million in high school- they sold a lot of boob mags, but nothing terribly raunchy. She hated cleaning the men’s bathroom, because their were often two or three of them on the floor of the stall…
she nearly quit after I told her what a jizz mopper was.