So very funny, so very true: True Porn Clerk Stories.

When I was just a little high school grad, living at home and working my way through the local community college, I spent much of my time gainfully employed as a clerk in a video store. It was a good job, with flexible hours, and I could take home two movies every night - we were encouraged to do so, in fact, so that we could be better resources for the customers in their movie selections.

So anyway, this was a very small town. And we didn't have a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video yet. There were a number of smaller stores around, but we were the largest in the area (unless you wanted to drive half an hour into San Luis Obispo, where there was a Wherehouse Video, but that's so far away! Who wants to drive that far for a movie?). Not only that, we were the best source of adult videos in the county (and San Luis county is a mighty large county, I might add). The way it worked was this: the movie boxes were out on the shelves, and when a customer saw a movie he liked, he'd bring the box up and we'd then put the box in place of the movie on our shelves behind the counter. It was a good system, and worked most of the time, except when we had a movie behind the counter, but no one could find the box on the floor. Those were annoying situations.

So yeah, for the first six months I worked there, I was rather, um, squeamish around those renting the adult videos. As far as I was concerned, they were all gross perverts. They'd bring the box up for the movie they wanted to see, and I (and the other girls as well) would grab the corner of the box by my fingertips and retrieve the movie, holding it the same way. We'd have as little eye contact and conversation with the customer as possible and feel slightly sullied when they left. We fully agreed with the parents who complained about the adult section and felt it should be taken out. But it was never to be. That section made more money than the rest of the store combined. More than the moral standpoint, though, the owners had planned the store poorly (I'm not sure it was an accident, either), so that we could not see the room from the counter, and there was no door to the room, and kids tended to wander in there, whether they knew what was in there or not. Alas, it was something we just had to learn to live with.

[link via Ev]

There's more to this story, but it's been long enough in the writing and I'm no longer in the mood. Why don't you go get a good movie and amuse yourselves that way?