Esquire.

So this post by ELB, (take your time, I'll wait...) made me have a pang of nostalgia. Though I never worked in a video store, I did work in a movie theatre. An art-house one at that. Most of the people in the neighborhood were convinced that we were a porn theatre.
I started there the week reservoir Dogs opened, and left the week, years later, that reservoir dogs was re-released for some festival or double feature or something, making for good book-ends to that career. For a bunch of kids on minimum wage, we sure had a lot of fun. We threw parties every few weeks centered around the arrival of new movies, these started as employee screenings, but degraded into debauchery until every few months the management would tighten the reigns, and only allow employees for a while, but it would always go south sooner rather than later.
And the sex. Holy shit was that an incestuous bunch. It seemed like every body was banging somebody else who worked there. For a while, we had the honor of having the most gay employees, and were dubbed "the Esqueer". There was even one infamous instance where one girl joined in on a couple's wedding night.
I got held up at gunpoint there once. We had just emptied the lock box, and these two guys came in, waving guns. By "waving", I mean discretely hidden in coats, and held low, but hey, a gun is a gun. They got the a night's cash for some French movie, and my manager's wallet, who in his gay little way went prancing after them, and they shot at him. They didn't hit him. Or his giant Freddy Mercury mustache.
Erin's post concerns, partly, getting really stoned and fucking with the customers. This was a fond past-time of ours as well. The projection booth must have had a permanent layer of THC on the walls. The upstairs theatre was converted from the old balcony, and the screen sat in front of this little curtained area that we had a bunch of junk in. For a while we had a James Bond Standee up there, positioned so that when the light on the screen was right, it looked like a guy with a gun was hiding back there, behind the curtain. That lasted about a week before somebody complained. I think the projectionist adapted the idea to have a head on the film platter, so that if you happened to look up there while the movie was playing, it'd look like somebody was up there nervously pacing.
We had this massive stock pile of movie posters in the basement of the Mayan (part of the same chain, and although we technically worked for one theatre, we really worked at all of them.), My brother was put in charge of getting them in order one slow summer, a daunting task, given the piles and piles on posters there, form every movie any of the theatres had shown for the previous 20 years or so. Jeff decided to exact his revenge for such a menial task by alphabetizing all of the posters by the second letter of the title. Jeff could find any poster you wanted in a matter of minutes, but it took everybody else hours. I'm not sure they ever figured that one out.
By far, our favorite people to fuck with were the Rocky Horror Picture Show people. I mean, come on. They're asking for it. They're like the nerds of the band fags. How can you not? We did some really horrible things to them.
First off, the last movie of the night usually went in about 9:30 or so. It would take us about 20 minutes to do our side work, then we would lock the doors, file into the booth and get fucking shit-faced. Every once in a while, we'd poke our heads out to see if anybody needed to be let out, and to make sure nobody in line was setting anything on fire. To minimize their exposure to "real" customers, we started the line around the corner on 6th ave, and every week, we'd inch that velvet rope back just a little more, till the line almost started in the alley. The show was supposed to start at midnight, but we would rarely venture out of the booth before 12:30. THEN we'd let the "cast" in to set up for a while, THEN we'd start letting the idiots who actually paid good money week after week in, and start the show around 1:00, pushing back the 2:00am show, if we had one, even further. NOBODY was let in before we said so. That meant that if some poor sap was in his Frank-N-further garters and it was -10 degrees and snowing, he still had to wait. He should have brought something other than a cape to cover himself. We'd make them go get us pizza or send them to the grocery store for stamps. One of our favs was that even though we had a cleaning service, we'd make them clean the theatre of rice and toast and toilet paper before they left. The weird thing was that they were happy to do all of it, because we were the cool kids, and they desperately needed our approval. The even weirder thing is that in the circles we ran in, we were NOT the cool kids, and we desperately sought approval from everybody else.
It was a fun job. No responsibilities, very little politics. If it weren't for the appalling pay, I probably would have left later than I did. For a while I worked there in the evenings and at the coffeeshop in the mornings, but I was making far too much at the coffeeshop to warrant a second job, so I quit. After a while, they stopped calling me for employee screenings, and that was that.