[quote name='ToddlerTN']I wish I could just erase the last 24 hours of my life.
I guess I was just so excited about scoring all those games for $1.99 at CC yesterday that I wasn't thinking very smart when I went to work last night, and I wound up delivering pizzas with 385 games in the back of my station wagon. So that my 19-year-old "manager" (sometimes I call him a "kidager", get it? LOL, that's hilarious!) doesn't end up chewing my ass all night long, I have to drive like a bat out of hell. Well maybe you guys see the problem that I stupidly didn't expect. Those bags started sliding around on me, and I had 385 games tumbling around the station wagon for several hours, which just about drove me nuts.
It gets worse, though, because a few pizzas got ruined in the crushing onslaught of tumbling games, and the "manager" tried to deduct them from my pay at the end of the shift. So I didn't really feel like I had a choice...I had to show him who was boss. I got all Scarface on his ass and said, "Hey, kid...if you weren't still in puberty, I'd tell you to blow me." Of course he said, "Kenny, you're fired, and this time it's final!"
Then (and I have to brag a little here) I was just totally cool and smooth. I just threw down my Heat Wave™, got right up in his face and said, "That's not even a problem, and do you want to know why? Because I've got a huge-ass deal lined up at Gamestop tomorrow and I probably won't even need a job for about a year!!!"
Then I just stared him down for like 20 seconds while I backed around the counter and out the front of the shop real slow without ever breaking eye contact at all except for a few seconds where I bumped into a customer and couldn't find the damn handle to get the door open. NOBODY at all said a word the whole time and the "manager" had absolutely no idea what to even say back to me at that point, which made me look VERY cool to the customer, who happened to be a super-cute girl picking up a pizza, and I have to admit that the whole "quitting/getting fired" experience actually kinda felt good.
I came home and tried to go to sleep, but I was restless. Suddenly, the thought popped in my head that there's a Hastings in Murfreesboro, which is only like an hour from Bellevue, and I had a BRILLIANT idea. Hastings has this great deal where you can trade them 4 used games for 1 new game, and so I jumped out of bed to find a calculator. Within about 20 minutes, I had figured out that I could take these 385 games and trade them for 96 copies of a new release game, and then take those 96 new release games and trade THOSE in at Gamestop. And since they're a new release they will be worth $50 each, so that's $4800! I was kinda bummed when I realized that's not a year's worth of income, but still...not bad for an investment of $829.36!
So this morning I filled my wife in on everything that had happened so far, and she freaked out of course, just how women always do (they just don't understand numbers and money). But after I explained to her how the video game business works and how I had a deal brewing, she calmed down a little. I didn't like her being upset, but I honestly figured it will be like karma or whatever, like good things would come to me for being such a Cool-Ass Gamer (CAGer) and I would get what I deserve. Unfortunately, life doesn't seem to work that way.
I left the house expecting to close this deal and also hopefully pick up the iPod I meant to get yesterday. I drove all the way to Hastings, loaded my loose games into a Walgreens shopping cart I found in the parking lot, and pushed it into the store to make the trades.
When I got to the trade counter, the guy working there looked at the Walgreens cart and then looked at me and asked, "What's the deal, Homeless Joe?"
"I just want to trade these in, how long will it take?" I asked, ignoring his lame attempt at humor.
"Are those all sealed?" he asked.
"Yep, all sealed. Can I go pick out some games for the exchange?"
"Umm, no man," he told me. "We can't take sealed games. You've got to open them."
"WTF?" I half-yelled at him. "These games are Shaq-Fu'ing SEALED GAMES, man, why do I need to open them?"
"Because that's store policy," he said, and just turned around like he was done with me.
So I just stood there debating between kicking this guy's ass "Karate Kid" style or just playing along, and realizing that I had already spent $829.36 that I couldn't really afford in the first place, and then lost my job last night, I decided to make him happy and open them up. I pushed my Walgreens cart over to a little table full of books and started stacking them on the table as I opened them each one at a time.
"Hey, you can't do that in here." I look over and it's the trade guy yelling at me.
"You said to open them, which is what I'm doing. Where do you want me to do it?"
"You can't open games in here, it's store policy."
I swear I could feel my ears getting hot, and I wanted to tear into that guy like Dolly Parton manhandled Dabney Coleman in "Nine to Five" (a classic flick, by the way). But I just kept my cool, said "man, you suck" and wheeled my games back outside where I opened the remaining 383 of them in the car.
An hour and a half later, I pushed my Walgreens cart back to the trade counter. That's when it all started to unravel on me.
I don't know where my homeboy went, but now there was an older chick working the trades. She asked me what I wanted to do, and I explained it all to her. She just shook her head and said, "You can't do that, you can only trade in four at a time."
WTF?!?
No matter what I said or did, she would not budge. I even explained how my "kidager" fired me when a few pizzas got crushed and she didn't give a damn. So, realizing I wasn't going to win, I shouted, "You're the second Hastings employee today who sucks!" loud enough for other customers to get the message and pushed my Walgreens cart back to the car again to head for Gamestop at Cool Springs Mall.
By this time I was starting to get a little nervous about this deal, and honestly, wondering if maybe my beloved Cheap-Ass Gamer community had let me down. I was driving at the time, so I didn't have a calulator and I kept getting different numbers every time I did the math, but worst-case scenario I figured at an average of $10 a game at Gamestop, I should at least walk away with around $3000 cash.
So now I arrived at Cool Springs Mall, and I loaded up my lucky Walgreens cart (which barely fit in my car with all those games loose in the back) and pushed it into the mall and onto the escalator to get to the second floor. THAT was a nightmare of its own, because once the cart lifted and tipped, all the weight started coming back on me and I seriously thought I was going to lose the whole thing and crush everyone behind me with a video game avalanche! Luckily it didn't happen, and once I got to the top I had a good chuckle to myself...which turned out to be the only funny part of the day.
Then I had to wheel it through the food court (which is busy as hell on a Saturday), because I never go to the mall without snagging some of the free samples they have out at all those Asian shops. I ended up getting a lemonade at Chik-fil-A and something called "Chicken Surprise" at Bayou Bowl.
Oh...when I finally got down to Gamestop, I noticed they are right in front of the elevator. LOL.
So I try to get my cart into Gamestop, and they have these ridiculously small doors in and out with security stuff like you're boarding a plane or something, and I'm banging the crap out of them trying to get that cart through. I felt like an idiot but it did fit eventually, I just had to really push.
Now after all this work, I'm ready for my big payday. He asks if I am seriosuly trading them all in and I say "of course I am" and tell him about everything that has happened up to this point. I guess he felt sorry for me or something, because he was super cool and said he would do what he can, but he may have to do multiple transactions and its going to take a long time. I said that's fine, because I may go buy an iPod anyway and I'll be back. (Obviously I wan't really going to buy an iPod until I got my cash from Gamespot, but I just wanted to look cool).
An hour later I came back and he still wasn't done. "Hurry up, man, I have to get that iPod!"
He said, "You're not planning to buy it with this, I hope."
"Dude, don't mess with me, please...what's the deal?"
Now you guys are not going to believe this, but their system would only let him give me just over $300 on the games he had scanned so far, which was about 310 of the 385 games! That's less than $1 per game!
I was freaking out now. I would have just taken them back to CC and gotten a refund for them, but now thanks to the Hastings mess, they were all unwrapped. So I basically had no choice at that point but to keep going with it and let him finish scanning them. And then doing each transaction was a nightmare, because he could only do them in batches, and I had to fill out a form for every transaction...it was a total nightmare.
By the time it was done, I got $364.62 from Gamestop, and the guy who did my trades also gave me $20 out of his pocket for the titles the system wouldn't take. Of course I spent $829.36 at CC, so I lost $444.74 on this "deal." And lost my JOB. And needless to say, I didn't get an iPod today. I did end up with a sweet-ass Walgreens cart, though, and I'm sure I'll treasure it for many years to come.
On the way home, I pulled by the pizza shop and decided to apologize to the "manager" but he wasn't there. The real manager was there though, and he had apparently heard what happened last night. I guess it was one of those situations where he only heard one side of the story, and he had already decided I was in the wrong, even though it wasn't even halfway my fault. What really sucked was that nobody else working today would stick up for me when I started shouting "Who knows the truth? Who knows the truth? Somebody f'ing help me!" Nobody said a freaking word in my defense, and these supposed "friends" I had been working with for weeks now suddenly couldn't speak or something. So when the real manager picked up the phone and said "Kenny, I'm calling the police again" I knew it was pointless and just left. What none of them know is that I have an extra Heat Wave™ at home that I use to keep the pizza nice and hot whenever I go pick up carryout from their competitors (which always tastes better, by the way), and they are NEVER going to get that Heat Wave™ back!
The last straw was coming home and telling my wife that "things didn't quite work out" today. Talk about freaking out, she went completely ballistic. She yelled and cried for at least ten solid minutes before I could tell her I had a plan to possibly get out of this mess. I'm going to take the $364.62 and go buy a bunch of $1 lotto tickets and if we can at least double our money, everything will be back to normal...except for my job, but I can always go back to babysitting or find some kind of work temporarily until I land another stable job. Like I think somebody said earlier in this thread, although it may not seem that way right now, karma will take care of me...just wait and see.
So my fellow CAG'ers, please wish me luck. I'm headed out to pick up a bunch of Lucky 7's tickets, and I'll be scratching them all night long. Hopefully I'll have won something by time for church, and my wife will come back home.
Anyway, how was any of this my fault? I just was trying to get in on a good deal, and apparently this thread was full of misinformation. And what the hell can I do about it now? Just live and learn, I guess, and don't believe everything you read on Cheap-Ass Gamer.[/QUOTE]
Yup..uh huh.
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