Mem'ries

This article in the Daily Press has made me sentimental.
Video Update was my very first place of employment. They opened a store right near my house when I was about 17 years old and I couldn't have been happier. I must have spent two hours walking around that place on the day they opened. I immediately applied for a job but was unable to be hired until I turned 18 thanks to their "back room" movies.
Within a week of my 18th birthday I went to apply for a job at Video Update. The staff knew me pretty well by then thanks to my movie habit. I was hired quickly and was given a red polo shirt with the Video Update logo.
Although it could be boring, Video Update was an outstanding part time job. I really loved that place. My supervisors, Penny & Vera, were cool ladies. I got along with almost every person I worked with and we generally had a good time. We got free movie rentals so the minimum wage paycheck didn't seem too shabby to me.
The worst part of the job was a duty called "moving the wall". This little joy of a chore was when you had to make room for new cassettes (yup, this was still the day of VHS cassette tapes, DVDs were just arriving for rental when I left the job) on the new release wall. I would have to scoot tapes over and make room for new videos. Sounds easy but it's a huge pain in the ass to space tapes out evenly. Usually this required moving several hundred VHS tapes over by just one or two spaces. It was a ridiculously tedious chore and my friends would stop in and make fun of me whenever they knew that I was having to move the wall.
The BEST part of the job was the "back room" movie stocking. We wouldn't receive particular titles or special requests, we would simply receive a large brown box full of random unsorted VHS tapes. Several employees would have to go through the tapes and label them and stock them. The titles were incredible (I remember such gems as "Canadian Beaver Hunt", "Ass Ventura, Crack Detective" and "Doin' the Butthole Boogie"). No, I didn't make up those names, those were 100% real movie titles. I would spend hours just crying with laughter and writing down titles to share with friends. We got to scope out all of the people renting dirty movies, including some upstanding citizens from local governments and church who were checking out interesting and questionable films.
This back room was an endless source of entertainment. Also, it's where I found "The Opening of Misty Beethoven", my favorite adult film (and one of my favorite films, period) that ended up really changing my life and the way I saw adult cinema. But that's another story.
So reading the article that the last of the Video Updates (which would later become Movie Scene) is closing its doors forever brought a little tear to my eye and made me feel sentimental. The store where I once worked shut its doors last year and that was a sad day for me. At least I have happy memories, but I'm sad knowing that my fallback job is no longer secure and that I'll be really screwed if I leave my current job as I have no video shop to return to.