Tales From The Video Store...

The video store I work in seems to have some of the dumbest members to EVER hire movies. These are some of their stories.

Well actually this guy was trying to buy movies, which is fine. I love it when people walk in off the street and take a look @ our selection of ex rentals or new dvds to buy, we pride ourselves on how well our ex rentals play at my store. This guy looked around for a while at some of our ex rentals, then came up and asked if we had Kung Fu Panda for sale. We didn't.

Now Kung Fu Panda has been a hard movie to find for a while because of shipping problems into NZ for certain dvds, but it's becoming less hard to find. Well this guy seemed to have been looking for the dvd for a while now. And when I told him we didn't have it, he just lost his shit and flat out told me I had just ruined Christmas for his son.

I hate Christmas shoppers sometimes

Well it's that time again, school holidays have rolled around for New Zealand children everywhere, so this means *Video Store* is busier then ever! Sadly this also means parents dropping their kids in the store and going away for an hour to have a coffee or do some shopping, so we have become an unofficial babysitting service too.

Now I hate when people do this during the year because my store is not in the best neighborhood so leaving your kids alone around here isn't the BEST idea, but being the holidays im a little more tolerant about it because lets face it two solid weeks with kids who are bored out of their minds because the weather is still too crappy to go play outside is not fun, and yeah parents might need a break from them for a little while.

But!

Leaving kids alone in a store still presents a whole new set of problems, the biggest one being if they need to go to the toilet they are almost always too shy to mention anything to one of the staff members, and since our store doesn't have public toilets this often leads to little accidents which we don't mind cleaning up, it's part of the job. However, there are still a select few parents who KNOW their kids need to go to the toilet, and instead of doing anything about it they just keep telling them to hold it, and lets face it bladder control at a young age is dodgy at the best of times, so when these kids have accidents I always want to give the parents the mop and bucket and make them clean it up.

Along with toilet issues this holidays we have also had some weather damage to the store, on Tuesday night a HUGE storm hit Auckland and did all sorts of damage to the roof of our complex, so now we have a few new leaks in the roof of the store, which is never fun. The storm got so bad that the lightning and thunder set off the fire alarms and we had to evacuate the store for an hour just in case the roof went altogether, that's one hour less work for me, so YAY! And I got to perv at firemen, which is always a nice surprise on a work night.

Some of the dumber films are renting super well, which is always depressing. The temptation to just destroy all the copies of Epic Movie and the new Bring it on flick are very strong, but I enjoy my job so I wont. Also we are having issues getting some movies in because the Paramount distributor for New Zealand went into receivership so an arseload of Paramount movies we should of had two months ago (Watchmen for one!!) are sitting in a warehouse somewhere not getting watched or rented!

I love the holidays!

On February 28th 2009 a new law will be passed in New Zealand, this law in it's most basic explanation says that "if your ISP suspects you of downloading copyrighted materials it will cut off your internet access".

Sadly for New Zealand ISP and internet customers alike the way in which Section 92A is worded is not only vague but confusing also. The way this law defines an ISP also includes Universities, schools, libraries and anyone who provides an internet connection to people. So if your parents provide you with internet access, under Section 92A they qualify as an ISP.

Another downfall when it comes to this badly written, hastily pushed through new law is that if an ISP even suspects that you are downloading copyrighted materials they BY LAW have to shut off your internet connection. Now I understand the need to protect copyrighted material, just by working in a video store I can tell you that by customers downloading movies instead of hiring them our store's profits have been cut by a drastic amount. But because of the way this law has to be enforced it violates customer's rights and their expectancy of a certain amount of privacy.
This law is just trying to solve one problem (downloading copyrighted materials) by creating another problem (forcing ISP's to become internet police).

Ernie Newman of Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand has been quoted as saying “It is unacceptable that Parliament has placed the burden of sorting out this mess on ISPs, ISPs in New Zealand are socially responsible; it’s not their job to interpret and enforce vague laws, particularly when they interfere with their customers’ rights. Worse still, the definition of ISP in the Act captures schools, universities, and libraries – in fact just about anyone who provides internet access to someone else. The loose language Parliament has included in the legislation will require an army of lawyers to interpret, at the expense of ISPs and ultimately, their customers.”

And the TUANZ aren't the only ones who feel this way, both customers and ISP's alike seem to be united in the fact that this is a horribly rushed, badly worded, pointless, and generally difficult piece of legislation to police. It seems like Section 92A is more of a showpiece for the New Zealand Government to prove how "up to date" and "tech savy" they are.

Basically, Section 92A is a pile of dogshit