Current mood:	awake
Current music:	"For The Love of God" - Steve Vai

Friday Now
...and I don't have much going on. I have work from 2:00 to 5:00 PM and I'll actually be home to enjoy a meal with my family again. Last time was, um, I believe Monday or so. I find it disturbing to not know the last time I ate with them. It's mainly because I've been working the closing shift at work a lot. Always hours like 1-9:30, 2-9:30, 5-9:30, etc. Oh well. Earning the moneys so I can't complain.

Speaking of work, I know I probably haven't complained much on here about it, but I can easily change that. Last night was very annoying. Not the entire night. No. Once 8 o'clock hit, it was dead quiet. But before that it was strictly the opposite. We've had a ton of Arabic kids just wander around our store lately. It wouldn't be so bad, but I've counted up to 8 kids in one family in our store running from demo station to demo station. And they always have to shout. I want to know why the shout. You see everyone else just looking at games or joking quietly to each other, but when they come in they pick up random games (which they probably have no idea about) and shout something across the store to one another.
I want to write about how unique of a location our store is in too. Our GameStop is located within a mall. Now a mall is a great spot for one-stop shopping (screw you Wal-Mart) if you're a female, actually buying stuff, or perhaps meeting a friend to catch up quick. It's <b>NOT</b> a great spot to wander around aimlessly, gather with more than 4 friends (I've seen packs of 10 teenagers running around), and if you work there. Especially around the holiday hours. Oh dear god. Because we're a mall that's located in Rochester, Minnesota, we have the [famous] Mayo Clinic. Now we get a large number of visitors because of that. Some (or most, I dunno) are from other cities, states, and countries. It's not only the Mayo Clinic that attracts these people. Believe me. I want to say that in my year and a half (roughly) of working at GameStop, I've talked to people who speak English, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Somali, and more. Needless to say, as far as retail goes, it's a harder location to work at than, say, a strip mall shop.
Now I wouldn't necessarily complain about selling things to visiting foreigners, because when they do buy stuff from us, they buy a lot. A quick example, last night we had a transaction that was a grand total of $1000. Exactly. He bought a MGS4 80GB PS3, four new PS3 games, three used PS3 games, a used PS2 game, and two DualShock 3 PS3 controllers. Now the guy I sold it to was pretty cool. He was buying it for his brother and he spoke very well. A very painless transaction. However, there are a few problems we get sometimes. Here's a list:

- When children try to buy a game, they don't realize we have tax. So they look at a $19.99 game and only hand us a 20 dollar bill.
- Some of them forget about region encoded games. So if they try to buy games from here and play it on a PSP they bought in Kuwait, they can't play it. Same goes for about every other system except for the DS and perhaps PS3. I'm not too sure on the PS3 though.
- If they buy a system here to take back to their country, they always ask about the voltage. It's nice they ask, but it's always the same answer. They need to buy an adapter so it transforms the voltage to 240 instead of 120.
- We get a lot of returns from them, because the child didn't "actually" want the game or system.
- Always a Nintendo DS, PSP, or PS3. Sony has definitely won the Middle East it seems. We rarely get anyone looking for a Wii or XBox 360.
- That last one doesn't seem like a problem, but let me expand. They are used to looking and touching (and maybe trying it) the hardware before they buy. We run things a bit tighter here in the US. We're not suppose to bring out any systems from the backroom until after the purchase (same goes for DS and PSP). If we show them a used one to try out instead it does confuse them, so I've learned to avoid that.
- They love our demo stations. Almost too much. It wouldn't be a pain, but sometimes when there's more than one trying to get on it, they get loud. Very loud. And yes, we have had to tell them to lower their shouting before, but we do that with anyone who shouts.

I'd go on, but I don't want to look like I hate these people. I don't. It's just frustrating sometimes, because there's a lack of good communication most of the time. I know how it feels. I did go to Europe last summer for a couple of weeks, so I can relate a bit. It's also very frustrating when we get certain customers in our store who are not understanding enough. In the middle of transactions, we'll have people just come up and set either trades or games they want to buy right over the other person's stuff. I usually look at them confused and say sometime like, "Um, I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of helping this customer, but Peter/Jesse/Luke/etc. can help you over there." And they just kind of go, "Oh..." in return. Ah, patience really is a virtue.

Enough of work for today. I'll be picking up a 120GB HDD for my 360 when I go in to work, because my 20GB is already down to just 3 gigs. Makes me pretty irate, cause I've deleted everything I don't need on it, but yet I guess there's still 17GB worth of crap on it. I know for a fact that only 3 gigs or so is game content, 2 gigs at least is downloaded games, and the other 12 gigs must be hardware memory. It's BS. Whatever, I'm only spending like $18 on this new HDD and I'll need it seeing as Rock Band 2 is coming out next month.