Practice Post

Today's first customer was a slightly obese kid, somewhere between ten and twelve years old. The poor fellow looked like he had no idea where he was going as he stumbled along, bobbing his head. Queen had stepped out for a minute, leaving me alone to watch the store. Eventually the kid wandered up to the counter and stared up at me with inquisitive eyes.

"Do you guys have any older games?" he asks me, to which I ask what system he means.

"Pee-es-too."

I blink before explaining he just wandered through the PS2 games. Yet he pressed on, saying we didn't have it. The game he was looking for.

"What game are you looking for?" I ask politely, in my friendliest tone.

"Dukes of Hazzard."

In the end, he was right; we didn't have any Dukes of Hazzard, and the kid left defeated.

. . .

Not an hour passes while I'm at work before all hell breaks loose as a tall man with long hair carrying a duffel bag walks in. He unzips the duffel bag in a cocky manner, revealing 40+ PS2 games and two memory cards he wants to trade in. I help Queen out a bit with checking the game discs before wandering off to distract myself with inventory work. I didn't have the pleasure of talking to him too much; he didn't seem the type to take pleasure in conversation to begin with.

Cleaning up after the massive pile of games he dropped off with us took most of the evening.

. . .

In our deadest hour comes two men roughly in their twenties. One sported the perfect policeman mustache, the other the perfect peach fuzz; both wore hoodies too big for them. I watched out of the corner of my eye as they wormed their way around the store, picking up games, laughing at the "silly" ones, and leaving a mess of things in their wake. I wasn't too far behind, reorganizing everything as they passed; there wasn't too much to do.

They made their way to the Gamecube games as I continued to fix the mess that was the Xbox 360 section, making their opinion of our wares as public as the store we run.

"Hey, look, they got Zelda!"

"Nah, man, you don't want to play that one, that's the cartoony one, that's stupid."

I sighed to myself. I am only an opinion, after all.

In the end, after they took their sweet time making a beautiful disarray, the gentlemen picked up NBA Ballers: Chosen One (XB360) and Half-Life 2 (Xbox).

I blinked.