CD store experience not music to anyone’s ears

Every adolescent music geek dreams about working at a CD store.

When I applied to the local… Every adolescent music geek dreams about working at a CD store.

When I applied to the local mall’s Sam Goody at age 16, I imagined my supervisors would be fun eccentrics like the characters in the movie “High Fidelity” and that the store would be patronized by adorable indie-rock girls, previously unseen in the suburban Pennsylvanian landscape. We would discuss the historic importance of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, bond over our mutual love of The Pixies, and then have hot sex in the store’s dirty break room.

Incidentally, this is how all my daydreams ended at age 16 — minus the dirty break room.

But during my first week on the job, I faced some unpleasant revelations.

Neither of the store’s two mangers was like the laidback screwballs of “High Fidelity.” One was a still-acned member of my high school’s class of 1996 who took out her frustration at her life situation by throwing cassette tapes against the wall.

“Another damn day at the Goody,” she said as she shattered a copy of The Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You.

She failed to achieve her dream of becoming an anesthesiologist and, apparently, it was Mick Jagger’s fault.

The other manager was a scowling, skin-headed man whose two primary beliefs were that gloomy goth rock should be played on the overhead speakers regularly and that employees would better understand instructions if they were uttered with a Hannibal Lecter-ish.

Plus, the store was less like a cool place to hang out and more like a business. I spent more time organizing CDs, manning the cash register and unloading boxes than trading “Paul is Dead” clues from Beatles albums with co-workers.

Oh, well, I thought. At least, there’re still the indie-rock girls and the hot sex.

But I discovered that the store’s customers were not interested in indie rock, not interested in having sex with me and, yet, nonetheless expected me to assist them.

Revelations A and B were crushing and C wouldn’t have been so bad if the customers were not all unbelievably stupid.

They stood before me, humming songs they heard on the radio to me, expecting that I would know the exact CD on which to find the melody they were mumbling.

They needed to be guided to the Aerosmith section, never thinking that it might be under “Rock: A”

And once they found the CD they wanted, they stared at it blankly for a moment, put it back in the wrong place and then headed back to Orange Julius for another smoothie.

While most customers were unpredictable in their stupidity, there were a few trends:

If customers bought a CD by Garth Brooks or Celine Dion, he or she would waste 15 minutes of my time, explaining that it was for someone else.

If a customer liked a band that cannot correctly spell the words “corn,” “biscuit” or “stained,” that customer would likely be unable to read a price tag without assistance.

If a customer was older than 60, he was probably looking for some obscure opera CD released 10 years ago, which I knew we did not have, but which I had to search for anyway and then, confirming that we didn’t have it, explain that we may be able to “special order.”

But the elderly customer would not understand the concept of special ordering because he stopped understanding new concepts 20 years ago.

“Here’s some U2,” I felt like saying. “People like them. Go home.”

After six weeks, with the cute indie-rock girls failing to show and my urge to physically batter customers becoming uncontainable, I left Sam Goody. I took a job washing dishes and scrubbing pots at a local restaurant. The work was grimy but did not involve questions such as, “Which Snoop Dogg album has that song about pot on it?”

The moral of this story is this: Do not take a summer job at a CD store; it is actually a really crappy job. Be nice to the people who do work at such stores. And if you’re old and looking for something no one cares about, don’t even step in the door. You’ll just bother people.

E-mail Nick Keppler at pnk6@pitt.edu.