Happy Convenience Store (2)
Fuck. I really walked into the wrong damn job.
All kinds of posts go up on the convenience store gallery.
Someone smashing a glass bottle so the drink inside comes pouring out. Someone knocking over a stacked pile of inventory. Bugs getting into the store. That sort of thing.
But the posts that make your blood boil from the first line — the undisputed number one — are the ones about problem customers.
Those come in every flavor, too, under categories like these:
The history of the problem customer dates back to prehistoric times, and is even said to be recorded in the Subakdo murals of Goguryeo.
Yes. Just like the one currently screaming his lungs out right in front of me.
"Hey!! Can you not hear me talking to you? Are you ignoring a customer right nowwwww?!!"
Well. I had to give him one thing — that bellow yanked my consciousness back to somewhere on this earth after 0.2 seconds of the Infinite Void had turned my brain into static.
"Get the manager! Don't you know the customer is king??"
A French revolutionary marching song about sending people to the guillotine seemed to be playing in my ears, but I did my best to ignore it and spoke to him the way you talk someone down off a ledge.
"Um, sir… if you could just calm down for a moment…"
"Calm down?? After winding me up like this you want me to calm down???"
What exactly was I supposed to do with that.
I hadn't ruled out calling the police or the Store Manager, but anomalies didn't seem like the type to have cops, and I still had no idea what kind of anomaly the Store Manager even was. While I was turning it over, I remembered the spiral notebook I'd been handed earlier.
"Let me just check the inventory and I'll get you a bag…"
I threw out a reasonable-sounding excuse and flipped the notebook open.
1. Anomalies who ask for the bathroom / Wi-Fi — p.2
2. Anomalies who ask for a bag / a discount — p.4
3. Anomalies who will not leave — p.7
4. Humans — p.11
5. Twenty Questions Villain anomalies — p.20
6. Anomalies who flirt — p.23
7. Anomalies who want to barter — p.24
8. █ — ████
What was that last line?
It looked like a sentence that had been scribbled out hard with a red-and-black pen, but what I needed was item two, so it didn't matter.
"…! ……?!!"
The muttering under his breath was getting louder and uglier by the second. I did not have a lot of time left.
I flipped to page four as fast as my fingers would go.
Anyone who asks for a free bag or a discount is one of two things. Either they only just became an anomaly, or they are completely insane.
The ones who've been anomalies for a while already know our boss is worse than your average lunatic.
So if they look, at a rough glance, like they only just turned — read the following line exactly as written. Ninety-nine percent of them fall for it.
Anyone dumb enough to demand a free bag or a discount isn't going to catch anything weird in what you said. All they'll hear is "thirty times" and "compulsory levy."
But what if they don't fall for it? Or they're some off-the-charts lunatic?
Then what else can you do… press the red Store Manager call bell under the counter.
Once you've called the Store Manager, cover your ears and get down. Stay down until you get the feeling that someone has left the building. You'll have to clean up whatever mess is left, though.
The original tips were written in one person's neat black-pen handwriting. Underneath, in every color and every scrawl imaginable, previous clerks had piled on asides and extra advice.
So basically, don't call the Store Manager unless the situation is truly beyond saving.
What I had in front of me was a textbook middle-aged male problem-customer anomaly. Picture "convenience store middle-aged problem customer, male/female" and take the male — that face, plus skin that looked somehow off in a way that wasn't quite human.
Fortunately, he had the look of someone who'd only just become an anomaly.
The kind who had probably already made a name for himself doing this exact shit when he was still alive, though.
Career-track problem-customer anomalies are not welcome in our industry either, for fuck's sake.
I was pretty sure this body of mine didn't even have blood circulating properly, but I could feel my face trying to change colors anyway as I turned to this amazing specimen of a problem customer and started reciting from the manual.
"Sir, complimentary provision is automatically classified as an act of theft under Article 3, Clause 1 of the Anomaly Special Act. Theft is subject to a compulsory levy of thirty times the value as a matter of principle — would you like me to proceed?"
"What kind of bullshit is that! How does giving something away for free count as theft? That doesn't make any sense!"
Oops. Backfire?
But then again. Who was I?
A master of gallery flame wars. A Gallery Professor. A man who could explain things so that even the kind souls dragging the national average down to a Grade 5 could follow along. This was a fight worth taking.
"Sir, a payment is a record that goods and money changed hands, right? So what happens if I just give it to you for free?"
"Wait, you don't mean…"
"'Huh? There's no record of this person buying anything, so why do they have this item?' You could be misunderstood. That's what I'm saying."
"Aigoo! Fine! Fine, I get it! I'll be watching you — do better next time."
Complete bullshit, of course. By that logic, why would 1+1 deals exist? Why would there be sales events?
And what's this 'do better next time'? You come back here again and you'll die by my hand.
I rang up another five or six customers after that before things finally went quiet for a while.
In the middle of the lull the whole store plunged into a bone-deep freeze, so I got up to see what was going on — and found some deranged formless anomaly camped out in front of the freezer with the door wide open.
Fortunately, threatening to call the Store Manager made it jump out of its skin and bolt outside.
For an anomaly that should have known better to pull a stunt like that. Thanks to that idiot I had to crank the temperature back up and mop every trace off the floor with salt water, and I worked up a real sweat doing it.
Anyway. When you have time to kill, what do you do?
The gallery, obviously.
For a genuine gallery addict like me, that went without saying. And besides — there was an anomaly I needed to apologize to.
Now that I had a body, I could work the gallery window with my hands instead of just my thoughts. I pulled it up.
This was clearly the time of day when anomalies were being productive, because instead of the usual garbage the gallery was actually doing what it was supposed to do — serving as a place to share information.
Can an anomaly even become a guardian spirit, though? What, because guardian spirits are spiritual beings too?
Help me / the Administration Bureau / the company / hunters → boring and academic, no relation to me yet, 99% chance of being a slog.
Guardian spirit anomaly → 0% chance of losing an argument, over quickly, sticks in the memory.
I couldn't help myself. I clicked the first post.
You've all heard of Yangnam The Hill, right?
One of the most expensive apartment complexes in the country.
I was camped out in a vacant unit there when a bunch of feng shui masters showed up, started going on about how they could feel an evil presence and anyone who moved in wouldn't live long, and the rumors piled on top of rumors until the unit I was in became a stigmatized property.
Funny how people with money worry about that stuff even more.
Maybe because they've committed so many sins and lived so uncleanly?
Anyway, the price dropped to almost one-tenth of what the other units were going for.
I figured that was it, I'd just be alone in there forever — and then before long a new person moved in.
And the second they arrived they set up an ancestral altar, brought in a spirit tablet, and started enshrining me as their guardian spirit. lmao
Let someone buy a house at one-tenth the price and they'll call even a serial killer "Lord Guardian."
So now I scare them on a regular schedule and live large off the points and the food they leave me.
"Hmm. I see."
So this was the real-estate squatting meta.
I wanted to live that sweet life too, so I looked into it — and it turns out there's a reason they hold shamanic rites every time they build a house, and a reason every home has a talisman or a crucifix in it.
Which meant I was stuck continuing the convenience store grunt life.
Wait. What was I going to do again.
That was when I finally remembered. I had been meaning to apologize to the clerk from the previous shift, and to ask them to look after me going forward.
Type 'ForeverAlone50' into the search bar… oh, found them.
I tapped their profile and hit one-on-one chat.
First conversation. Start with a greeting, obviously.