True tales of Hollywood Video

Me? A big ol’ nerd slacker? Work at Hollywood Video? Oh yeah. That was the majority of the clerks at that chain, in fact. Slacker nerds who’d watch Justice League and The Lion King on the TV.

Because the company screwed us all over by withholding raises, constantly cutting hours, etc., two main things happened. One, people stole a lot of stuff. Mostly concessions, the irony being that if they paid us the extra dollar an hour they were supposed to, we’d have just bought the drinks. But they didn’t, and they never refilled the water cooler, so we just took them.

Second, we screwed off all the time. We made shit, messed with shit, and watched a lot of DVDs instead of cleaning.

One night, my friend Haru and I were bored and because the district manager was coming around a lot lately, we were limited on our viewing options. The official rule was nothing over PG, and nothing that’s not animated. We’d already seen enough Pokemon and had been watching Lilo and Stitch anyway, but we felt like a change.

“Hahaha, dude, look! Garfield and Friends! We should totally ironically watch this”, I declared. “Oh wow, yeah!” says Haru.

See, here’s the thing. As a kid, I really liked Garfield. Maybe it’s because I had the older collections, the ones with Lyman and Jon’s sad, sad life, and where Garfield was an exceptionally fat fuck who didn’t even stand on two legs. But I knew in retrospect, it was pretty bad. At least the show was. Hit or miss with the comics, I’ll say, to be nice and because hey, sometimes they were funny. Not so much these days.

And we made a sport of bad movies and TV there, because sometimes that’s all we had to watch.

Haru and I both ended up physically ill that night, so much so we almost had to close the store early. It started around 10-15 minutes in, just after one segment of Garfield and Friends followed by one US Acres. We turned it off, I got a pizza from the Little Caesar’s in the shopping center, and we were okay. Nobody else who came in that night got sick, before or after, even other employees who hung around a while, as we were all wont to do because it was a fun place when you’re not working.

Just the two of us, watchers of Garfield.

The lesson we learned is that TV really can be bad for you, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.