Tricks to play while working Retail
A quick post to give some people a bit of a chuckle, or maybe just lose me some readers.
As you can tell from my journal title, I am a game store clerk. We deal in non-electronic games only; like Dungeons & Dragons, Settlers of Catan, and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures. We're a pretty extensive place, and independantly owned, so we have a lot of leeway in how we conduct ourselves. Must we be professional? Yes, absolutely. Must we kiss the boots of everyone that walks in here? Oh no... absolutely not.
But how do you snub the people you would like to never have to talk to while still keeping them paying you the money for goods you provide? Well... a few years ago I came up with the perfect solution, one which was used to it's most brilliant today. It is for this reason that I will share one of my secret weapons against the worst of the worst in gaming.
The hobby games industry has a huge amount of companies that want to do buisness with the retail location; some are fantastic in their support (Fantasy Flight Games and Privateer Press are two of the tops in my book), others treat most retailers as unworthy peons that should be greatful to carry their products (Vajra Enterprises and Games Workshop, I'm looking at you). But the ordering and tracking of stock in these companies is a near-constant job, even if you do buisness with distribution companies (for those not in the know, Distributors act a warehouse system to buy from many of these companies in bulk and then sell piece-by-piece to retail). But there are those companies that want to handle all of their customers, and are a great bit of work.
So, now armed with that knowledge, I present you with my solution for dealing with stereotypically annoying gamers that do nothing more than reinforce how many people see Anime and Gaming fans:
I invented a new game company.
It exists nowhere but in the minds and actions of myself, my boss, and my coworkers. "Misdirection Entertainment" (not the name we use, but it helps illustrate my point) handles so many different aspects of the industry, and provides so very many related essentials to what we sell, that we can never ignore the paperwork associated with them. Unfortunatly; their shipments are always coming in at the most inopportune times and their stock reports so involved that, quite often, we have other coworkers come up to us in the middle of those conversations about the latest season of Naruto-DBZ-Inuyasha (which we explained that we do not watch) or the progress of the amazing homebrew that was created to bring Half-dragon Jedi into Forgotten Realms and reshape the realms as Gods, and report a sudden emergency relating to this company.
This, of course, means that every availible staff member must now either be looking a massive amount of accounting info up on the computer system, be hand checking all the shelves, or in the back trying to find lost shipments. Yes, we have time to answer questions about product and sell items, but we must be professionals and get that darned Misdirection Entertainment work done before the end of the shift.
Is this a cruel thing to do to socially innept individuals who may just be excited about their fandom? Maybe; but it's also cruel to subject another person to a conversation that makes them wish they could gnaw off their own limbs just to spare themselves another moment of listening. More often than not I'm more than happy to just talk to my customers and learn about what they are doing, but I have a job to do, and I'm not paid to humor every single candidate for bad_rpers_suck.
As you can tell from my journal title, I am a game store clerk. We deal in non-electronic games only; like Dungeons & Dragons, Settlers of Catan, and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures. We're a pretty extensive place, and independantly owned, so we have a lot of leeway in how we conduct ourselves. Must we be professional? Yes, absolutely. Must we kiss the boots of everyone that walks in here? Oh no... absolutely not.
But how do you snub the people you would like to never have to talk to while still keeping them paying you the money for goods you provide? Well... a few years ago I came up with the perfect solution, one which was used to it's most brilliant today. It is for this reason that I will share one of my secret weapons against the worst of the worst in gaming.
The hobby games industry has a huge amount of companies that want to do buisness with the retail location; some are fantastic in their support (Fantasy Flight Games and Privateer Press are two of the tops in my book), others treat most retailers as unworthy peons that should be greatful to carry their products (Vajra Enterprises and Games Workshop, I'm looking at you). But the ordering and tracking of stock in these companies is a near-constant job, even if you do buisness with distribution companies (for those not in the know, Distributors act a warehouse system to buy from many of these companies in bulk and then sell piece-by-piece to retail). But there are those companies that want to handle all of their customers, and are a great bit of work.
So, now armed with that knowledge, I present you with my solution for dealing with stereotypically annoying gamers that do nothing more than reinforce how many people see Anime and Gaming fans:
I invented a new game company.
It exists nowhere but in the minds and actions of myself, my boss, and my coworkers. "Misdirection Entertainment" (not the name we use, but it helps illustrate my point) handles so many different aspects of the industry, and provides so very many related essentials to what we sell, that we can never ignore the paperwork associated with them. Unfortunatly; their shipments are always coming in at the most inopportune times and their stock reports so involved that, quite often, we have other coworkers come up to us in the middle of those conversations about the latest season of Naruto-DBZ-Inuyasha (which we explained that we do not watch) or the progress of the amazing homebrew that was created to bring Half-dragon Jedi into Forgotten Realms and reshape the realms as Gods, and report a sudden emergency relating to this company.
This, of course, means that every availible staff member must now either be looking a massive amount of accounting info up on the computer system, be hand checking all the shelves, or in the back trying to find lost shipments. Yes, we have time to answer questions about product and sell items, but we must be professionals and get that darned Misdirection Entertainment work done before the end of the shift.
Is this a cruel thing to do to socially innept individuals who may just be excited about their fandom? Maybe; but it's also cruel to subject another person to a conversation that makes them wish they could gnaw off their own limbs just to spare themselves another moment of listening. More often than not I'm more than happy to just talk to my customers and learn about what they are doing, but I have a job to do, and I'm not paid to humor every single candidate for bad_rpers_suck.