Still bullshit. I really wanted them, they had a badass Cloud stand.
The GameStop Experience
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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They're generally located within other stores these days I think, I guess because the market for people who want the last few copies of The Mystery of the Druids is getting pretty thin. There's one in my local Sports Direct, which is never a good sign.
The closest (ha! 150+km away) bricks and mortar gaming store to me doesn't even carry PC games, just a couple of overpriced 'gaming' keyboards and mice.
I agree with you on that. I should note I'm not expecting everyone to love their entry level crap tier job or anything. I just think it's unfair how the worker gets treated from all sides in these kinds of jobs, and they deserve better than this. "It's an entry level job/you're not supposed to work at these jobs for long" is an excuse people like to throw out that dismisses the problem entirely.
I can't speak for everyone else in the world, but I've gone into as many jobs as I can with as much of a positive attitude as I can muster. It lasts for a little bit, until it doesn't. (And let's be real, retail/fast food is soul sucking)
Social media is generally pretty shite, and I agree with the effect seen here. Everyone's chasing for clout and validation. Though, one has to wonder what else surrounding them and their lives is making them feel like they have to chase those things. It's a fairly complicated issue that "looking on the bright side" doesn't always fix.
I honestly wish I was able to get far enough to see this kind of success. It's not like I don't do my best to try or anything. There's just a lot fighting against me and it's tough to see results for my efforts
I just randomly remembered another hilarious moment at Gamestop:
Sometime in 2009, I was in the store for the usual scouting for my next game.
Suddenly, this mom storms in dragging her kid behind. She slams down the game on the counter and began to berate the poor employee of selling such violent game.
It was Modern Warfare 2, and she was mad about the infamous "No Russian" mission. The employee calmly reminded her that she was the one who bought the game for her son in the first place, and the employee tried to warn her about it and she blew him off. She wanted a refund regardless, and this is where her pre-owned games credit policy really stinged her; Apparently she paid like $90 for a special edition, and she was getting back just $30. She was getting angrier by the minute. Her son, probably no more than 8, comes over to counter and asks if they can get the game in his hands instead. The woman says "sure, sweetie" and asked the employee if they can put it towards that game instead. Out of curiosity I leaned over to see what it was.
On the counter was a copy of Dead Space (2008). I almost spewed the smoothie I was drinking.
As much as this situation was funny, I didn't want the mother to pay extra for the inevitable therapy for the kid. GS employee must've thought the same, because he asked multiple times if she was sure, trying to describe what the game was about. She didn't listen, and demanded to go through with the trade in, complaining about how the employee was wasting her time.
So the GS employee opens the case for MW2 to check the disc, and he let out a snort as the disc was scratched badly. The mother stupidly admitted she tried to get the disc out the wrong way while the game was running. GS employee smirkly told her the trade-in value dropped to $3.
She just left without saying another word, towing the kid in her hands.
I did end up getting Batman Arkham Asylum that day, and that's how I spend the rest of my weekend.
Sometime in 2009, I was in the store for the usual scouting for my next game.
Suddenly, this mom storms in dragging her kid behind. She slams down the game on the counter and began to berate the poor employee of selling such violent game.
It was Modern Warfare 2, and she was mad about the infamous "No Russian" mission. The employee calmly reminded her that she was the one who bought the game for her son in the first place, and the employee tried to warn her about it and she blew him off. She wanted a refund regardless, and this is where her pre-owned games credit policy really stinged her; Apparently she paid like $90 for a special edition, and she was getting back just $30. She was getting angrier by the minute. Her son, probably no more than 8, comes over to counter and asks if they can get the game in his hands instead. The woman says "sure, sweetie" and asked the employee if they can put it towards that game instead. Out of curiosity I leaned over to see what it was.
On the counter was a copy of Dead Space (2008). I almost spewed the smoothie I was drinking.
As much as this situation was funny, I didn't want the mother to pay extra for the inevitable therapy for the kid. GS employee must've thought the same, because he asked multiple times if she was sure, trying to describe what the game was about. She didn't listen, and demanded to go through with the trade in, complaining about how the employee was wasting her time.
So the GS employee opens the case for MW2 to check the disc, and he let out a snort as the disc was scratched badly. The mother stupidly admitted she tried to get the disc out the wrong way while the game was running. GS employee smirkly told her the trade-in value dropped to $3.
She just left without saying another word, towing the kid in her hands.
I did end up getting Batman Arkham Asylum that day, and that's how I spend the rest of my weekend.
One of the cruel realities of the world is sometimes....sometimes....hard work doesn't pay off. For some reason the best workers, honest people just have a shit hand dealt to them that causing things to never go their way. It sucks but it happens and there isn't a lot that can be done about it. These people are the exceptions, not the rule though, often times it's outside factors like bad relationships, or problematic family situations that just hold them back enough that they are seemingly stuck.
We should not treat the whole situation of workers as a principal of being abused, mistreated, and underpaid. Does it happen, yeah probably, but I think a lot of people exaggerate it, especial in the social media age where being victimized is good for engagement.
I can say I worked in the food service industry for 7 years, Carl's Jr, El Torrito, and a long stint of graveyard shift working at Denny's while putting myself through school. I can tell you I was never really mistreated. But I worked harder than most of my Co-Workers especially at the Denny's and Carl's jr. El Torrito was a blast, everyone got along and all the cooks would have tailgate parties in the parking lot after work everynight, shit was a blast.
The worst of it is from shitty customers to be honest. Which I'm not really sure how that's a problem of the job or the employer, but there is a real problem with people treating food and service people like trash, which of course adds to people hating the job. If I'm serving you hand and foot and dealing with a bunch of crazy demands while you eat at a fucking Denny's expecting Gordon Ramsey to be in the kitchen, then you better leave more than a 50 cent tip otherwise I'm gonna wanna shove these quaters down your throat you miserable goblin.
Funny story, I was working a Thursday night Graveyard shift, which is a really really slow graveyard shift typically. Usually it's just me and one cook. We were chillin until a fucking bus rolls up into the parking lot and like 40 people got out. I told the cook to throw on a shitload of hashbrowns just to get them going because it was gonna be bad. Turns out this was a tour bus for Gabriel Illgesias aka Fluffy. All his people starting filling booths and he came right up to me and said, "I'm taking care of all this, make us all some eggs, bacon, hash, and pancakes don't even worry." He was cool as fuck about it. I told the cook and then made pitcher of OJ and Water and passed them around to all the tables. At the end of it, Gabriel paid, left $300 for a tip which I split with the cook, and it was all good. Scary at first, but thankfully they was chill.
That does sound like a blast. Wish I and anyone else I know who has worked in the food service industry was able to have that kind of fun.
Which is pretty much my point on why people don't wanna work at these jobs to be treated like this. For many, it's not worth the poverty wages they get paid to be completely shat on by ungrateful customers. What's worse is that if you have the gall to stand up for yourself and ask to be treated with respect, they'll often get more angry, demand the manager, and then you're in trouble and the customer is rewarded for the trouble and inconvenience of you asking for a basic level of decency. Sometimes these places have good managers that back you up, but some are complete boot lickers and it sucks.
To vent a little bit... I've been fighting with a social and learning disability all my life, which has made maintaining a good relationship with whatever job/work I'm doing, and the people in it, much more difficult. I'm better at it these days, but it's never easy. To make it worse, I'm also fighting with depression, and a stress and anxiety disorder on top of it. While there's improvement on that front, and I'm being medicated for it, combined with the former issue... it's basically tanked my ability to maintain work for longer than a year, sometimes harder than 6 or even 3 months. The jobs that go past the year mark usually have me dragging myself down hard to keep at it, to the detriment of my mental well being, which has never gone well.
Despite my positive energy and hopefulness going in, my strong work ethic, and my best efforts to make whatever job I'm doing work... it just doesn't. No amount of trying to keep a positive attitude, or treating the job with respect, or trying many different kinds of work, has been able to make it turn out different. After a lot of work with my therapist, we've come to a conclusion that I'm struggling to come to terms with.
It's that I may simply not be capable of being able to hold a typical job; one with the kind of work environment and people that come with it, maintaining a positive relationship with my manager(s) or boss(es) above me, within the scheduled hours expected of me, over the duration of a longer period of time.
I am clearly capable of working, obviously, considering I've worked up until this point since I was 14. But every job has had more or less the same pitfalls, and nearly every one of them ended with me being an anxiety and stress filled mess that needed to escape the position I'm in because I can't handle it any longer.
I have an appointment next week, one I'm bringing my parents to (who have been supportive of me for as long as I can remember) so they can hear this for themselves, and so that we can hopefully start working out a plan of how I'll be able to support myself in the future. If I'm being honest, it fucking sucks. I want to be able to work without much issue. I want to be able to support myself. I want to be able to function in a regular society. But all my life, I have been kicked down again and again, told that I simply cannot. So either I keep trying the same thing, hitting the same walls till the day I die... or I start trying something different. It might be time to do the latter, and I have absolutely zero idea what it's gonna look like for myself.
/End vent, hope you don't mind, just needed to get it out a bit
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Try looking for something with non-standard hours that doesn't require a lot of social interaction. Personally, I've been a lot happier since I've started shift work. You need a good, schedule though. You want 12 hour shifts so you get more days off, I've heard 8 hour shiftwork is a nightmare. How my schedule works is that I work two weeks of days and two weeks of nights. W(ork)W O(ff)O WWW OO WW OOO (Switch). Basically I get a weekend every 2 or 3 days, and it's a lot easier to mentally cope because it's always only one or two more days until the weekend instead of "Oh god, I've been doing this forever and it's only Wednesday". Switching kind of sucks, though, but I also work by myself like 75% of the time, so that's another plus.
8 hours is already pretty rough on me, anything above 9 would make me completely break. A thing that I didn't mention up there (cause I forgot, and cause the post was getting long) is that full time hours are a quick way to make me fall apart as well, as it's too much and it becomes unhealthy for me to try and manage it alongside trying to keep a good work life balance. I'm doing 27 hours right now, with small shifts at the start of the week and 8 hour shifts for the last few days. Unfortunately, those 8 hour shifts are a total bastard, and I asked about them, but they can't be changed due to the nature of my job. Doing 5 days in a row isn't helping me either, even with the small shifts at the beginning.
Your setup is interesting, but I don't think I'd be able to mentally handle it
Well, not with that attitude. "Whether you think you can or think you can't... you're right." You get used to 12 hours pretty quick. Everybody feels pressure from needing to do a job all day 40 hours a week to begin with (I'm talking the first few years), I used to complain to my dad about it all the time about being stressed not feeling like I could keep doing my job for years and years, and he told me about when he used to make the same complaints to his mother. She told him that you need to can't go in to work and say "I hate my job I wish I wasn't here" you need to tell yourself "I love my job, I'm happy I have one" even if it's not true, and to think of all the reasons you need to keep doing it. You need to be tough on yourself and make yourself see things through. You need to make goals and force yourself to stick to them. This is why I still think you should be getting a trade. It has minimal education requirements, and you get payed while you learn it, and it's something that you focus on seeing through.
I'll share something I don't think I've shared here before. So I dropped out of high school after a bad break-up and spent a couple of years struggling with depression, eventually I got over it enough to finish Highschool by correspondence, then a little while later unable to think of what to do next, my dad got me to sign up for a government program where they pay companies minimum wage to accept a worker for 6 weeks, and I got on at a place rebuilding pumpjacks. It was hard work, and pretty stressful at times, but I kept going with it and eventually there was talk about another worker apprenticing as a millwright, I asked if I could apprentice too, despite not even knowing whether I wanted to this job for another year, let alone 4. Well ended up being registered and the other guy never ended up doing it. After 3 years during a prolonged slowdown in the oilfield I got my current job at an insulation factory and I'm a journeyman Millwright now. No, it's not a passion, though I am pretty good at my job. I don't really have any interest in doing anything mechanical outside of work, and I don't love my job, but it's ok, and after 6 years of steady work it feels a lot more bearable to face the indefinite years of work in the future than it did 4 years ago.
The thing is there's a couple pacts I have with myself. You never miss work unless your really sick (like a fever or something). This is important because if I ever let myself skip just because I didn't feel like working that day or that I could stand to deal with it I would never go in again. That day I dropped out of high-school was the first day I ever skipped, and I never went back. Once you've broken, it's so much harder to pull yourself back together. So you have to decide that you will uphold your responsibilities no matter what. The other is that you never quit a job unless you have another one lined up. You need to keep working or you are losing that acclimatization to doing stuff that you don't like every day and it will be that much harder do do it all again when you get another job and telling yourself it's ok to quit. No, it's not okay to quit. You need to work as much as anybody else so you don't end up being a burden on the people who love and support you.
Now, like you've said, you can work. There's nothing wrong with you physically or mentally to prevent you doing a job satisfactorily. You just need to come up with a way of tricking yourself into changing your perspective into a better one. Like put a rubber band on your wrist that you snap every time you catch yourself thinking a way you don't want yourself. Or a mantra or a song that you repeat to force your thoughts on something else. You're only anxious as long as you keep dwelling on the source of your anxiety and it's hard to stop because you aren't in the habit of stopping. I know it feels important to keep thinking about these things and that you need to, but where's it gotten you so far? You need to form a new habit of breaking out of that loop as soon as possible and it gets easier the long you keep it up. That's what I do.
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My mum basically used me as a vetting point for any games that my brothers wanted once they were old enough to play them. We accepted that I got away with shit due to ignorance but we didn't want to repeat it so my stupid ass became the guru on the mountain.
Who's telling you that you simply “cannot”, or is that just the “life” part figuratively? Idk, maybe your therapist would be able to recommend different types of fields that introverts excel at. Especially with so much being digital now there has to be something out there. Hope things turn out better for you down the road.
That last part almost sounds like a version of OCD. I had that bad for most of my teens, and early on a therapist suggested the rubber band thing. Well, those didn’t last long lol. It ultimately took 60mg of Prozac a day to “fix” my brain to stop getting hung up on thoughts of bs, and letting them control my life. It was like training wheels and eventually around college age I didn’t need it anymore. Idk if it’s still prescribed or if there’s something even better now, but back then it was kind of considered a wonder drug. Hell it was even in a Neil Diamond song, which I think helped ease my parents’ minds about the whole situation too lol.
After saying I've not seen one for 10 years I actually walked past one on a night out last night. Typical.
No not OCD. I would just get hung up on thinking about certain things and stress until I felt so bad I couldn't do anything else. Eventually I realized that those thoughts were really destructive and there was nothing to be gained by focusing on them, and that I needed to immediately redirect my thoughts whenever they crossed my mind. I still fall asleep listening to a Let's Play that I've already watched, just to give me something to focus on, but I'm a lot better now and can deal thinking about that stuff now as long as I'm careful not to dwell.
That woman is a literal meaning of the phrase, "You dumb biatch."
Reminds me of a mother in 2018 that was concerned about buying her 15 year old son, Dark Souls III. He was deciding between that and Black Ops 2. I asked "Do you let him play GTAV and COD?" She said "Yes". My response: "Congratulations, he already play worse with much more explicit content than anything Dark Souls related!" The mom give me nothing, but a blank stare of realization. The kid seemed okay, but he boasted claiming he knew what Dark Souls was and "loved a challenge". I show him a clip of the first boss for DS III on my phone, and while tries not to show it, the boy was obviously scared of challenge/hard difficulty. He decided to get Black Ops 2, and his mother paid for him. This was at my favorite GS as well.
A more heartwarming story was me helping an 18-year old getting some good single player games. He and his friends got burnt hard by Anthem, and were looking to get away from nearly anything multiplayer or "live-service" related. DMC5 was one of their choice of games. This happened back in 2021.
This is a Best Buy story, but I remember back in 2018 a family of four was there (mother, father, kids son, and younger daughter) and the mom was desperate looking for any Disney Infinity figures. None of them had realized that Disney shutdown DI long already by that point. I told the mom, "Sorry ma'am, but the servers and the items have been shut down and sold out long ago! Even if you got the figures, it wouldn't matter, because the servers have been shut down. They're glorified paper weight now". The mother had this big look of shock and despair, while kids weren't affected by it much. The boy was indifferent, the girl asked her dad can she get something else, and the dad said "No, you already got two things earlier this week." The dad took the DI revelation in stride, and had an "Oh well" attitude. I did feel bad for the mom though. She did thank me and saw no point in dwelling on it. I give her props to recovering on it well. Also goes to show how locked out of the loop casual consumers were and are now. The good news is that even casual audiences are getting sick of dumb or overly long trends in gaming.
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My OCD would be triggered by thoughts, like not being able to do something until it left my head, or I could think of something else, because I was convinced something bad would happen to me. As a kid growing up, it was a bit of a nightmare, especially when I hit driving age. Like one time I drove around for hours because I couldn't think of something good when I entered the town limits. That's when Prozac really was a godsend. It was somewhat easier to hide/deal with when other people were around, or I had something to do that required critical thinking. Funny thing was it never bothered me when I played video games either.
I think the best thing to come out of it all was I'm probably a lot more disciplined mentally now than I would have been otherwise. I'm able to work through things constructively and rationally, knowing there's always at least two different ways of looking at things.
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