Gonna be real with you, readers, I had a different post, a single-page short story I hammered out to exorcise the lingering emotions of an affecting dream, but… maybe that’s just for me? I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anything there worth y’all reading. Instead, I present Tales From the Nerd Farm.
So there came a time after my last marketing gig when the EI had run out and I needed some form of income, and as we may recall the post office wasn’t a good fit. A friend owned an internet cafe, one I’d long patronized for Thursday night gaming sessions, and they needed someone to work weekends. A few months later, I was the new manager. Time passed, and this job I took to keep busy while trying to get a career going became the longest I’d ever worked anywhere.
And then COVID happened, and five weeks of no revenue and no rent relief meant the city’s last standing internet cafe, home to gamers, people with no home computer who need to do an online training course, and people who need documents scanned, closed for good.
I’ve never talked about it here, because I tend not to discuss current employers on the internet. But now that it’s gone, I may as well share some stories of some of the oddities, the times good and bad, the weird things you get used to working at an internet/gaming cafe… a profession that might be going the same way as my old gig, projectionist.
(Digital projection basically killed that as a specialized skill. Ushers can download a movie and press a button.)
And I’m going to start each section with “Something I Always Wanted to Say to a Customer but Never Did.”
But I never did, Brianna, I am a professional.
Next page: The Frequent Flyers