The Laserdisc Incident

I debated whether or not to tell you fine people this story. It's a funny story, and no doubt blogworthy, but it's a humorous incident that happened to me at work. This is about as close as a video store clerk ever comes to facing a crisis of professional ethics. Do I tell you about the amusing thing that a customer did, as there's an extremely slim chance anything I write on here will ever get back to him?

You're reading this article, so you can already guess my answer.

A guy comes into the store to sell us several boxes full of used Laserdiscs. The owner of our store will buy just about any Laserdisc for a quarter. Most aren't worth much more than that, but he operates on the principle that every rare once in a while, he'll end up only paying a quarter for a disc that winds up netting him $20 or more. It has happened a few times. Just the other day, I shipped out a Laserdisc of a filmed kabuki performance to a professor in Washington State that ran him over $15.

So, anyway, this guy comes in with two massive boxes filled with Laserdiscs. And not neatly stacked and organized discs either. They're haphazardly filed, some discs put away in the wrong sleeves, others missing sleeves or discs altogether.

We start to notice that there are random bits of mail and other papers scattered throughout the box. We find an application to carry a concealed weapon (denied). We find several pieces of mail from the Police Department of Culver City. But most humorously, we find a pamphlet on premature ejaculation.

Yes, that's right. This guy brought in Laserdiscs to trade in with a packet of information about cumming too soon, right into a video store, and then milled about looking at DVDs while we went through it. Not only this, but the pamphlet had attached to it a receipt, indicating the man had spent about $20 on the pamphlet and a further, undisclosed amount on some sort of product designed to prevent premature ejaculation from occuring in the future.

Is this the most embarrassing thing that could possibly happen? I mean, I don't think we let on to the guy that we saw anything funny, so unless he randomly comes across this blog, he'll probably go the rest of his life never knowing a group of snarky video store clerks are laughing and posting on the Internet about his penile dysfunction. Unless he left it in there intentionally for us to find, because he gets off on revealing his humiliating medical condition to complete strangers and then watching their reaction. I'll grant this last option isn't terribly likely.