A lot of my co-workers leave the pawn shop for their half hour lunch breaks. I, on the other hand, rarely leave. I tend to bring homemade lunches and eat them in the break area, primarily because lunches are cheapest this way. Having said that, the actual eating of my lunches does not generally take all of the thirty minutes I am allotted, but you would be wrong if you assume that I would just clock back in early and then return happily to work with a stomach fool of semi-nutrious food. I need every minute of down time I can get by that point in the day. Besides, there are many things I can do with my few extra minutes of lunch freedom--text friends, make necessary phone calls, play on my iPod, read something, collapse onto the break table and try to gather my strength to face the endless stream of pawn shop patrons, or shop.
There are definite good and bad points to seeing all of the stuff that comes into the pawn shop before it's put out on the floor to sell. It's great to have first dibs on a lot of things, but this is very detrimental to my meager budget.
Today, I had several Playstation One games I wanted to purchase along with three Game Boy games (Darkwing Duck, Ren & Stimpy's Space Cadet Adventures, and Ren & Stimpy's Veediots!--yes, you should be jealous. I found two, count them two, Ren & Stimpy games.) and I decided that before I purchased these items that I should look over The Wall once last time (this is a wall, hence the name, in the back area where new merchandise is placed until it is either 1) put out on the display floor to sell, or 2) stored away in our storage area as it waits to be put on display for sale). Who knows? Maybe I'd find more unnecessary items that I would compulsively decide to buy.
As I was picking over The Wall, I found what appeared to be a 4 GB SD card that was still in it's original packaging. I was very excited as 1) this was marked at the low, low price of $9.99, and 2) my employee discount would slash that already generous price down to UNBELIEVABLE SAVINGS!. I was, however, disappointed soon after my discovery of this item.
Upon closer inspection, it was made clear that someone had scammed the pawn shop. They had very carefully cut the plastic around where the SD card should have been so that the plastic casing flipped open as if on a hinge. And, as you may have guessed, the actual SD card was missing. The tricky thing about this was that there was a picture of what the SD card looked like where the actual card should have been. It was a very good picture and had even fooled me into thinking it was there until I noticed that the plastic had been cut with surgical accuracy.
There were actually two of these SD cards, both of which were mere packages that had been cut open and raped of their actual product. I showed them both to the pawn manager and he was very upset. At first, he couldn't believe the items were gone. He squinted at the picture of the card and then I showed him how the plastic flipped open. He grunted, looked away, looked back at the package, reopened the plastic, and then tossed the packages away in disgust. He had been the one who had completed the transaction which had brought the useless packages into possession of the pawn shop.
For me, this is funny because of several reasons. 1) It was rather clever. 2) It was very ballsy to bring in two empty packages, knowing that someone would be inspecting them. 3) The picture fooled us, much like how Wile E. Coyote was consistently fooled into believing the rock wall is an actual tunnel. 4) The trick worked. It actually worked.
We were tricked like a freaking Looney Toon. But, at least, the trick involved SD cards and not the sides of mountains.
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