Working at Gamestop

The Bizarre"Hello, do you carry any games where you grow larger with food upgrades from three-legged Eskimo fairies while speeding backwards through Atlantis on a giant piece of cheese?"

The above two customer types may have the power to annoy and inconvenience you, but occasionally you'll encounter a customer who can confuse or even scare you. These can range from people who stare at your nametag and then proceed to call you by the wrong name, to people who make some very specific and strange requests when looking for games. I had a guy in the store recently who owned all the Bloody Roar games and was desperately searching for some other fighting game that let you transform into animals. I figured the guy was a furry and I almost suggested that he dress up in a giant raccoon suit instead of buying a game, but I didn't. It was partially because I didn't want to get fired, but mostly because I was afraid that his face would light up and he'd pull a wadded-up raccoon suit out of his pants and put it on. When confronted by this type of customer, I recommend using the human shield approach and throwing the nearest coworker at the customer to buy you enough time to race into the employee restroom and attempt to escape by flushing yourself down the toilet.

An artist's depiction of the pain Gamestop customers are capable of inflicting on you. I apologize for the fact that neither the artist nor the depiction are very good.

This information about the customers you will encounter is certainly helpful, just like everything else I have ever written or said, but it will take some practice to quickly identify and classify customers unless you're lucky enough to get people who walk in and immediately say "RARGH, I AM AN ANGRY CUSTOMER" or "Hello you big chocolate-covered cordless moon rock, I am a Bizarre Customer OH NO HELP BLOOOOO uh oh I swallowed my nose." Once you develop this ability then you can start coming up with your own methods of dealing with each different type, since there is no one cure-all method for dealing with every type of annoying customer (mostly because my manager rejected my idea of taking our staplers and strapping dynamite to them to make Stapler Grenades). These customer types may hold true for other game stores as well, but I don't care because Gamestop is simply the hippest and raddest store around and all other game stores collectively form the Great White Satan.

If you can manage to weather the storm of bad customers, then working at Gamestop can actually be a very rewarding job. I'm making piles of money, and they'll be even bigger piles once the Washington governor emerges from his secret volcano base and raises the minimum wage again. It's also good to know that if I ever need to supplement my income I can get some blackmail money with videotapes from a few weeks ago when one of my fellow employees and another guy got drunk and decided to reenact their favorite scene from Fight Club by taking turns punching each other in the face - not fighting, but politely taking turns. But by far the most rewarding thing about working at Gamestop is when a certain fellow employee challenges you to a game of Smash Brothers, brags for a week about his skill, then proceeds to lose horribly in front of everyone and have his mind and soul utterly and horrifyingly crushed by the loss. That's right Chris, I'm talking to you.

– Taylor "Psychosis" Bell