Andy Samberg arrived at the July 28th Paper Heart Hollywood premiere some time within the first hour and a half of my first shift at Blockbuster Video. He was wearing a blue, hooded sweatshirt. Very hip, Andy.
It was my first night dealing with customers face to face, and after a weekend of driving around in the ghettos of South Central LA, I was ready for a change.
Hundreds of people stood outside of our little store on the awkward intersection of Hollywood, Sunset and Virgil. You could hear all the girls screaming outside, horns honking, the hustle and bustle of LA's rush hour traffic.
It was my first night handling a cash register...perhaps a big step from using a dated GPS system in a twenty-year-old truck.
My manager on duty for the night was totally convinced that we were looking at Michael Cera.
From across the street, behind a thick, glass window, he could have been anyone...but having the sense that girls would necessarily go wild for a young guy like Michael Cera, we were all pretty much convinced it was Michael Cera.
It was clearly Andy Samberg:
If you look close enough at 55 seconds, you can see someone inside the store walking near the window. That was me, walking back to the counter to help some girl who was curious about what was going on outside. If I remember correctly, she may have been renting one of the seasons of The Office.
My memory never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps that's why I studied physics...quite a monumental step from tendering a transaction for a season of The Office for some girl at a Blockbuster Video in Hollywood.
It was my first night for a lot of things. Perhaps things that everyone else feels when they're sixteen and they get that first summer job when they're still in high school...when you're standing behind that cash register for the first time and your supervisor is standing right next to you.
They stand next to you and they walk you through the whole thing.
"Don't forget to hit total."
"Don't forget to clear out of the account before you handle the next customer."
"Don't forget to type 'find' before you do a title search."
It's all so simple and elementary for someone like me, but it's still a lot to remember all at once.
There are two customers behind the counter.
The first one changes their mind after I've already totaled their transaction...I'm taking too long to fix the problem...now there are three customers behind the counter.
Four. Five.
I am a monkey pushing buttons. The best way to get through this is to not think about the fact that I went from generating recurrence relations for bessel functions to dealing with impatient Blockbuster customers.
If I were still in school while doing this, that would be one thing. I have my master's degree in science now, and the next customer is a bitch who has no patience for mistakes.
She eyeballs me...knowing that it's my first night.
There are now ten customers behind the counter.
The crowd outside thickens and more and more people begin pouring into our shrinking store. The line behind the counter begins to remind me of the one in front of Pink's (more on that later).
I've finished totaling her transaction and she hands me cash, a scowl on her face.
Everything is going fine, except for the fact that her change is 33 cents and I mistakenly handed her two nickels and three pennies...perhaps the most common dimensionality mistake I make when dealing with coins.
She holds the change in her hand and stares at me, the same scowl on her face.
I look at the five coins in her hand and realize I've handed her two nickels instead of a nickel and a quarter. I laugh and smack my head...
I apologize, take the nickel and hand her a quarter.
Apology not accepted.
I pick up her movies and mistakenly hand them to her over the counter...a mental lapse in the wake of my first official mistake, and I've forgotten that she can't walk through the detector at the front of the store with the movies in her hand without the alarm going off.
"You're allowed to hand the movies to me right here?" The scowl remains on her face.
I failed to amuse this woman by passively admitting my mistake, apologizing to her and handing her the additional twenty cents that I almost short changed her by...
"No, I gotta hand them to you over here," I say as we both walk around the counter to the front...she continues to eyeball me.
"You have a nice night," I say.
Regards unrequitted.
She used me. I could see it in her eyes. I've seen that look before.
What she saw that night was a boy in his early twenties who couldn't do simple math...even with a computer right in front of him telling him exactly what to do.
I know this is what she was thinking because this is how my dad thinks...and she had the exact same look in her eyes that my dad has when he becomes frustrated with having to wait in lines. The teenagers who work at all those fast food joints...the malls, the supermarkets...when he gets frustrated because he has to wait in line longer than usual for someone who's in training only to find
that somehow the educational system has failed us all.
"How is it that they can't do simple math when they've got a computer right in front of them telling them what to do?"
This woman looked at me the same way my dad looks at all those kids...like they've been reduced to their lowest possible form of existence. That night she got an opportunity to look down on me because it was my first night working a cash register and I mistook a nickel for a quarter, and she thought it meant I couldn't add...a woman who more than likely hasn't seen any math beyond simple algebra, yet happens to be old enough to have grown up in an age where she might not have had the advantage of a calculator when she had my job.
That night, my job was not to rent movies out to customers. It was not to sell rewards or to restock shelves or to keep the store clean.
That first night, there was a hovering urge to inform all of the impatient customers that I was smarter than them, that I was more educated than they were and that I was above the job...that instead of being there I should have been working with a team of engineers designing a new satellite communications system so they could download more crap onto their iPods faster, or a new type of semi-conductor to use in a technologically advanced optical receiver for some new ground-based communications network...
That first night...my job was to NOT say any of those things.
Eventually the premier across the street at the Vista theatre ended and the crowd outside of our store began to thin out. The old, rotten cunt who tried to insult me was long gone, but took with her the last opportunity a Blockbuster customer will ever get to treat me like dirt...or so I thought.
It was a rude awakening for a first timer at Blockbuster. One of the busiest nights of the week, at the busiest location in Hollywood, during a red carpet premier right across the street, and all my manager kept telling me that night was that I was doing an incredible job for a first timer.
If it weren't for that, the woman with the stink eye might have actually gotten to me.
Once the traffic in our store finally died down, I had a few breif opportunities to get to know my coworkers...a chance to explain to them why my previous job actually stressed me out more than having to deal with miss hag-bitch.
We were approaching close when an old, black homeless man entered the store and began harassing us.
He stood at the counter, hunched over, looking at me sideways and mumbled what sounded like a bunch of hobo gibberish. I'm not one to dismiss people like that automatically though because I have terrible hearing, and for all I know they're trying to tell me that they're my long-lost cousin or some random shit...which is far too interesting to dismiss. Either way, I have to treat everyone who comes into the store like a customer. It's my first fucking day.
It wasn't until I asked him to repeat himself a second time that I heard him say, "what's a matter? You can't understand simple English? You a high school graduate, boy? Did you have college? You get your degree or something? I'm trying to ask you for the Blockbuster website, I'm tryin'a get online. I want the number to one of the other stores - the one on Western."
It being my first night, I have no idea where to look to find him the number for the Blockbuster on Western. I didn't even realize there was a Blockbuster on Western. I don't know the neighborhood.
One of my coworkers walks up to me and points at a tiny strip of paper with the numbers of all the local stores printed on it. The strip of paper is taped to the counter right behind my computer monitor.
I give him the address for the website and the number for the Blockbuster on Western and resist the urge to be an asshole about it even after his attempt to insult me. He then recedes into the back of the store and creepily stays there for an hour or so, wandering around aimlessly until my manager realizes that he intends to stay the night.
Just one more night of dealing with annoying customers like this and I'll be on my way to Oxnard, California for a weekend of sight-seeing and hardcore sing-alongs.
Eventually the police had to show up and escort the hobo from the store after he tried to get real on my manager.
What a first night, right?
We closed up the store and cleaned up the mess left behind by the several hundred customers who visited us that day. It wasn't until I had been working at Blockbuster for a few weeks that I discovered the clear view of the infamous Hollywood sign right in front of our store.
Perhaps if I play my cards right, this won't be the closest I'll ever get to being a part of all the silver screen action...and maybe all the Andy Sambergs of an era ten or twenty years from now will be walking on the same red carpet across the street for a premiere of something I've written.
Maybe not.
Maybe the premiere will be somewhere else.
