Best posts made by vanderlylle

One of my favorites out of many:

After moving cross-country, I got a job as a manager at a chain bookstore. This was March. Right around that time, the company was running a brief promotion that sent out coupons for a free ereader if you bought their largest tablet model. Good deal, right?

Fast forward six months. In September, I had a customer approach me at the info desk and put down her tablet. She tells me she bought this in San Diego and then saw the coupon for the ereader when she got back and she wanted me to give it to her. She had a printout of the email advertising the deal but not even the actual coupon, and because the coupon is what shows the expiration dates, she kept claiming I had to give her this device. I stayed mostly polite throughout, explained repeatedly that this promotion was outdated, I wasn't going to honor it, yes I am the manager so no you can't talk to anyone else, and even if it weren't expired, you don't have the actual coupon code and without that I /still/ couldn't honor it. Finally she got super pissed at me and went to storm out. And me, snide bitch that I am, said very politely after her, "Have a nice day."

Lady turned around and proceeded to ream me out for the next couple minutes, none of which I heard because she decided to lead with, "You need to go to customer service school!" After she finally did stomp out, I spent the next several minutes sitting in the floor at info giggling to myself and asking my co-workers if they thought this school would be accredited and did they have scholarships because I work retail and I'm poor.

No, it was definitely the same game, but I think Spider supposedly bowed out of running it for... RL, when it revamped? But was still there, being Spider-y behind the scenes? Or something? It was all very weird, and I'd mostly forgotten about that brief interlude of my gaming life where she was friendly enough to invite me into something, so I'm relieved other people actually remember this too. Seems like maybe there was a heavily HRed Immortals sphere, too, but I might be wrong on that one.

Having worked for a couple years in a used bookstore, I am always impressed by how people pay attention to. We'd regularly find nude photos in books, that one of us then got the honor of sliding facedown across the counter to the owner (and/or subject of photographs) when they came to pick up their merch credit. We also found money (even hundred dollar bills), family mementos, break up letters, I'm having an affair letters, I'm in jail letters... The letters always made for really wonderful dramatic reading for us in buyback.

Nothing, though, compares to the stuff people actually thought they were still entitled to get money for. Dog ate it? Just resell it. Cat pissed on it? Infested with bugs and rat shit? Nah, the used bookstore will take it!

No. No we will not take it, and we will a) yell back at you when you get pissed we didn't, and then b) go douse ourselves in the hand sanitizer we picked up in bulk at Costco.

If @Tempest is done tantruming over the fact that some people didn't have the same experiences and/or make the same value judgements as her...

Another thing I really unexpectedly enjoyed about RfK was the lack of RP rooms. Having grown used to people using or creating temp rooms for everything--up to and including using them as actual on-grid sites--it was nice for rp to actually be happening on the grid. I wonder if the redshirt bits were actually a step backward in that respect. On the one hand, they were really useful for finishing up a scene that ran long, or doing something casual during a spammy event, or if I had two scenes I needed to do and only one time slot that the people involved could make. On the other, I wonder if it would have slowed the breakneck pace and the burnout rate sometimes if I were having to spread things out more, rather than doubling or tripling up as I know some of us were doing.

As an aside, I really hate the term PvP. PvP is what you do in video game multiplayer. What RfK did well was give many outlets for managed character-vs-character conflict. Hell, I didn't just want to screw with my character's enemies; I made a character who was his own worst enemy and I was looking forward to the opportunity for him to undermine his own allies, even his regnant. (Jealous vice yesss) Coming from there back into the wider WoD world feels almost like games want to discourage characters interacting, for fear something, anything, might happen.

My company just started trying that--the new Dayforce system is not fully automated, but it's supposed to basically do the job for you anyway. It is one of the worst-designed programs I've had the misfortune of using, and can't even manage the basic functions of covering the three cashwraps and the cafe all day without your having to completely rebuild coverage for breaks and lunches. It also leaves unfilled shifts if people's availability doesn't look perfect for whatever arcane thing it wants, and it schedules people in weird areas of the store because you can't distinguish between 'jobs they do well/regularly' and 'if I have to have someone in this area for a few hours, this person is marginally better than a dead body.'

However, I /did/ set a new record on in-store excitement today when I had two of our regular problem customers that we've kicked out and attempted to ban already... decide to get in a fistfight while I'm the only manager in store all day. I ended up with a lot of blood on the floor, but kinda worth it to see one of my least favorites get punched in the face, and my #1 least favorite tased in return. Also, everybody's now trespassed, so all told, I'm considering it a victory.

@Bobotron Something like that is currently my plan for theme and a long-term through-line -- I am hesitant to call it a metaplot, but at least something that will give the game a framework beyond Bland By Night: Now with Other People Touching Your Stuff. I figure in an ancient city of vampires you'd have a certain level of entrenched power, and the best way to reset that scenario to the zero level for new PCs at game start would be some sort of Event that cleared things out and set the city into disarray. And I figure that having NPC antagonists control parts of the grid gives both external threats to let people fight--or to use in their power games--and lets me corral a smaller playerbase into a manageable IC footprint of a very large city.