Don't get too excited, because this post is less about dirty little secrets than it is about not engaging in subtle mockery with people who don't understand subtle mockery.
The man who owned the record store I worked in had expanded his empire to include more locations, and as such, there were some employees of the company who had so called "district" roles. A few of these people had real jobs, but some of them seemed to be just be old friends of the owner who were on the payroll for no good reason, taking money from the rest of us who really worked.
There was one man in one of these jobs that was particularly disliked. From where I was sitting, his job seemed to exclusively entail printing up typo filled flyers and leaving them on the store counter ("DJ Goldie will be spining!" - that's a direct quote that from one of these flyers that has stayed with me through the years). He was handsomely rewarded for his work. Or well, handsomely rewarded by indie record store standards.
That, however, was not enough for him, and here is where he made enemies. Like all record stops, we received tons and tons of promos. We used to divvy them up at periodic "promo parties" which involved copious amounts of alcohol, but that's another story. As a used record store, we bought back CDs. We often sold our own CDs to the store to get money to supplement our ridiculously bad pay (and then we would take the CDs we had sold to the store and put them on hold until we got paid, kind of like our own little pawn shop. Sometimes we got our stuff back in other ways, but 5th Amendment and all that). Obviously, selling promos back to the store was an attractive option. Pure profit. But, because we got them for free, and labels spent money pressing them, we could only sell them back to the store for $1 and price them at $2. That was the rule.
Well, our typo happy friend, who was technically outranked all of us in the store, didn't like this policy for himself. He scored lots of promos for unfathomable reasons, and he would sell them, like, 100 or more at a time, and insist we pay him full price for them. He'd walk out with hundreds of dollars sometimes. We hated him for it. Well that, and he was just generally a twat, but that's beside the point. He seemed to like to come to the specific shop I worked in most often, so although dislike of him spread throughout the stores, we had to put up with him frequently.
Now, it just so happened that one night, one employee of the store attended a party where a friend of a friend of a friend had way too much to drink. This friend of a friend of a friend confessed two things:
1. She worked as a dominatrix
2. Mr. Buy-My-Promos was a customer of hers
Oh, this information. It was better than winning the lottery. It was unclear what we could do with it, but just the knowing that we knew this dirty little secret of his felt so good.
Not long after, he came into the store. He had a huge box of promos. Tons of them. The same deal was in place - we were to pay him as though they were regular CDs. It must have been a shift change, because there were four of us behind the counter instead of the usual two. We all knew about the dominatrix. We decided to amuse ourselves. The conversation went kind of like this:
Mr. Buy-My-Promos: So, how are y'all doing today?
Employee One: Phew, I'm beat.
Employee Two: Yeah, these customers are really whipping us into shape today.
Employee Three: Definitely, we're really getting spanked here.
You get the picture. I believe "I'm all tied up right now" and other such things were worked into the conversation. We were quite pleased with ourselves, and he was none the wiser. The thing was, only three of us had been taking part in the conversation. The fourth employee was actually doing the buy back. I guess he decided he wanted a piece of the action, though. When he handed the money to Mr. Buy-My Promos, he said:
"Now, don't go take all this money and spend it on a dominatrix!"
Not only did he say that, but then he turned around, looked at the three of us, laughed and gave a self satisfied nod. For a minute it seemed like he might run around and high five us all. We just froze in stunned silence. Mr. Buy-My-Promos gave an awkward, "Ha ha, um, ok, thanks, see you guys" and high tailed it out of there.
Needless to say, this particular employee was frozen out of all future attempts at subtle humor amongst the staff.
