Last September, shortly after moving back to Southern California, I found a temp job working as a cashier at BlizzCon. On the assumption everyone else is not as much of a nerd as I am, I will explain what that is.
BlizzCon is a yearly convention dedicated to all things Blizzard Entertainment. This includes, but is not limited to, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm. It's a huge deal if you are into any of that shit. Used to play WoW, until I found Guild Wars, which to me is exponentially better. I do still love anything associated with gaming and cashiering I can practically do in my sleep, so it was a no-brainer to do the job.
I was glad I did. It was a lot of fun, mainly because of all the people I met. We had customers from literally all over the world and seeing so many people from different walks of life bonding over gaming is amazing and wonderful to me.
When they called me a couple of months ago to see if I wanted to work the event again this year, I jumped at the chance. Then I found out Wil Wheaton (one of my heroes) was hosting and I got even more excited, because hello...WIL WHEATON!! Bonus the closing band this year is Linkin Park (last year was Metallica), who I have yet to see live and now I'll get paid to see them.
Today was not exactly what I expected though. It wasn't bad by any means (at least not to me), but it definitely had some people on edge. Last year, the Blizzard store, a.k.a., merch booths were located upstairs on one of the main show floors, so people wouldn't miss too much since the wait is generally about 2-5 hours. This year, they have us in what equates to the basement, which would be great except it keeps fucking with our internet connection, which in turn fucks with our ability to do things like run credit cards on 60 registers at the same time without the system crashing. Apparently it happened yesterday as well, can't say I'm sorry I missed that. At one point, we had to do a cash only line of registers, which meant people that didn't know how to math like they said they could looked a little silly. If you can't math without a computer, you have no business cashiering. They got it straightened out after a couple of hours, but it was still slow going for the poor customers. I imagine we will be having these kinds of issues all day tomorrow too, so hopefully Blizzard learned their lesson and will fix it next year.
Cool thing about it though is we got to hang out with our customers longer and chat. It's the best part of doing this job!! Met a guy from Chile, a few people from Canada, Texas, Florida and Sweden. Just like last year, everyone is super nice, which is also amazing considering how long they are standing in these merch lines AND that some of the stuff they want sold out the first day.
So in about 5 hours I head back to the convention center to finish out the convention, ending with that Linkin Park concert. I'll be there all day, so hopefully I'll have some more interesting stories than this. :p
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