Shitty Movies At My Video Store

Why the hell does Stuart Little 3 have an advertisement for its Dolby Digital sound?

Who cares, the kid’s going to stop watching after it gets bored at the 10 minute mark anyway.

Watching Scream 2 in fast forward is the best way to watch Scream 2

One benefit of working in a video store is that, when you’re checking discs that people have complained are not working, you get to watch a wide variety of stuff.

Then again, you tend to cop mostly children’s DVDs and movies like Land Before Time 26: This Time It’s Personal.

Got a couple of posts queued up.

Sorry I haven’t been updating recently. Christmas. New Years. Nuff said.

I just realised that the first 3D movie we are going to have available at the video store is Piranha 3D. I don’t know what to make of that.

I just put an Adult sticker on ‘Rudolph Saves Christmas’ - now we play the waiting game…

I just encountered one of the strangest customers I’ve ever had.

He just moved to the area and wanted to sign up. I had to refuse him temporarily because none of his ID had his current address on it - he gave me his key like it counted as identification. He seemed generally odd.

Before he left, he asked me how my mathematics was in his strong Irish accent. I replied, “Okay, although I haven’t had to do it regularly for a few years because I do an English course.”

He asked me what the square root of 10 is. I replied that I couldn’t adequately express that to him as a decimal number unless he gave me significant figures as it is a surd and therefore an irrational number.

Then he said that what he is about to tell me blew him away, and I became genuinely interested, because if it is something actually mindblowing, I’ve had my mind blown. If it’s not, it is a good story to tell people over drinks and laugh about later.

He asked me to estimate root of 10 and I said more than three, less than four, probably around 3.1 or 3.2 - he grabbed a pen and paper and put 3.1 on the page. “10 is the first whole number after 9. 31 doubled is 62.” He placed a 62 as the next two decimal points. “31 minus 3 is 28,” he continued as he placed the 28 after the 62, leaving the number 3.16228 - he told me to square it and it gets pretty close to ten (the decimals only started after the hundred thousandth decimal place or so).

He then left because people came up to the counter. But he had stood there and talked to me for a good 15 minutes (I didn’t include his preamble). I pretended it blew my mind, because it really didn’t - patterns like this appear everywhere in mathematics and are the true basis of it (y=mx+b always creating a linear line with certain parts denoting certain values of properties, for example). But he was definitely one of the oddest people I’ve had, just because of how fucking random it is to talk about the square root of 10 with a 19 year old video store clerk.

I kinda want to talk to him again, but at the same time not. He was interesting, his demeanour and such, but one of the most annoying things to someone working in retail is a customer who won’t leave. I don’t know. I might never see him again. But in jobs like this you very occasionally come across people who have something to tell, a story, an idea, whatever. I want to open that hood and have a look in the engine. I want to know why the root of 10 meant so much to him; what switch did it turn in his head that made him want to tell me about it of all people (and I imagine I’m not the first he’s explained this to).

This is one of the rare times that my job provides a moment which holds some significance, something beyond, “Hi, do you have your membership card?”

If he comes back I’ll tell him that it’s actually 3.16227766… and his theory doesn’t work if you take it beyond 6 significant figures but hey, that’s in the future.