Maybe the Disks aren't Defective...

I realize that spending $10 on rented movies, taking them home, and not having them play sucks. I would be upset if I was in that situation. And sometimes The Buffer can't always fix them. But sometimes there are customers who take things a little too far.

Enter the "control freak" customer. Today, a guy came in with a disk that didn't work. However, instead of letting us know about it, he sat on it for 5 days and returned it when it was due. What took so long? His cataloging of exactly where the skips and freezes took place. Inside the plastic case with the movie was a list of the chapters that didn't work, and the timing where everything went wrong. (No joke. It was probably a serious undertaking to get this list made.) He then requested that I clean the disk from "chapters 8-12 and the first 5 minutes of chapter 14." I offered to clean the entire disk, but he said that we shouldn't mess with 1-7, 13, and 15-18 because they all worked fine. So only clean 8-12 and parts of 14. I looked at him blankly, put the disk in the buffer, and started it. The scratches went away. AND THEN HE DIDN'T WANT THE MOVIE BACK! I'm stupefied that someone would put that much work into something and not want to see the parts that he missed.

He later came back up with more movies, and we gave him a few for free. He damn near mandated how we were to scan the movies in the system. He handed them to us, one at a time, and made sure to have us tell him how much the movie was and how long he would have it for. The entire process took 20 minutes. His total bill? $5.49. Ugh.

Another star of the defective circuit was the man who rented "Star Trek: The Voyage Home." STTVH is a 2 disk set, meaning that one disk is the full-length feature and the second is the special features. There aren't many movies that we package with the special features, but this just so happens to be one of the exceptions. He came in, movie in hand, and started complaining before he had an employee's attention. (Luckily, it was my attention. Go me.) He started babbling, and I'm pretty sure that the only words I caught were "...not working...DVD...face of the case..." So I used the famous method acting technique.

Method acting involves putting yourself in the same state as the person you're dealing with. That means similar posture, facial expressions, tone and cadence of speech. By "stepping into his shoes" I determined something key to our interaction. This guy was utterly and totally drunk. (It probably helped that he smelled like a bar floor.) I got him to slow down and explain what happened.

He rented the movie, no doubt excited to delve into the "Final Frontier." His enthusiasm, (or inebriation), led to him putting BOTH DISKS INTO THE DVD PLAYER AT THE SAME TIME! He described the whining sound that was being made as he tried to jam both disks into the machine. (FYI: Most DVD players will only fit one disk. If you try to put two in at the same time, the auto-closing door will open or knock one of the disks out. Don't try it though, because that's not how its supposed to work.) He claims that the disks were stuck together from something the employee put on them. He pointed to a small, white bottle that was by our disk cleaner. He said that the liquid inside was a glue that made the two DVDs look like 1. I read the label on the bottle to him: Anti-Friction/Anti-Static solution for DVD cleaners. (Explain how that made them stick together, Mr. Wizard.)

Well, after both DVDs were in the player, he realized that there was a sticker saying there were 2 disks on the case. But he couldn't find the second disk! So he looked and looked and it wasn't there. So he called the store to find out where his second disk was. The employee claimed that it was in the case when he left the store, so he'd better find it. Well, he tried to open the DVD player, which was now jammed with 2 movies. It wouldn't open. He tried to pull it open with his finger, a paperclip, and finally a screwdriver. In fact, he pulled the entire face off of his DVD player. For the amount of force he exerted, the DVDs were surprisingly unharmed. I was trying to wrap my head around how, in a drunken state, this guy could use a screwdriver to carefully, yet forcefully, remove 2 DVDs from a jammed player, resulting in a damaged DVD player, but not a damaged DVD.

I told the guy that I'd just credit his account for the movies that were stuck together. But he wanted to keep talking, and decided to close the distance between us, just in case I wasn't able to properly hear him. Or smell him. (I think it was whiskey.) He repeated the story he just told, and I repeated my offer. His response? "That's better! Let's do that!" I gave him his credit, and he went on his way. I almost clocked out at that very point, but decided that no interaction could possibly be worse than that one.

I'm not ruling out a new champion for tomorrow. Anything can happen on a Saturday night.

Butchered Movie Title du jour: The Condamned. (Stone Cold Steve Austin's "The Condemned." Close, but just not correct enough.)