Circuit City: SC-1’s Secret Asylum

By: Beej
October 20, 2005

Tonight was a pretty standard day at work. Besides being excessively long, we were undermanned as usual and pretty much offering half the customer service we should have been providing........just how it should be. I had the pleasure of having a fairly interesting conversation about DVDs with a manic depressive insomniac.

She had a number of disorders because she had suffered extensive brain injuries after her car had been basically run over by a truck. She told me she had been almost decapitated in the accident, but according to her, "had unfortunately survived," receiving her aforementioned brain injuries and a scar on the left side of her face. She told me that her attention span was very short, that she was on a number of medications, and that she sometimes suffered episodes of rage that have landed her two charges of assault and battery, though she doesn’t remember what happened in either incident since she blacked out.

As a result of her short attention span, she usually watches animated movies that keep her interest, which brings me back to how the conversation started. She told me she had watched the new family guy movie, and wanted my opinion of that robots movie. I told her that I had seen robots two days earlier on the TV located next to my loss prevention station, and that the movie sucked, so she decided not to buy it. She wanted to purchase the machinist starring Christian Bale mainly because she could relate to his problem as an insomniac. I told her it was a good movie. She told me it would probably take her awhile to watch the movie straight through because of her attention span.......especially in her 2-3 weeks of not being able to sleep.

Often in the conversation she told me that she couldn’t shut up, and told me that at least I had the ability to get away from her if I wanted to. She said that often she wished that she could get away from herself, but unfortunately, and obviously, she couldn't. According to her, the greatest crime was that she was still alive, telling me shed rather have died than come out of that accident in her current state; shed opt for dying and going to heaven........but then again she wasn’t sure if heaven was a guaranteed deal.

At the very end she told me that although she often hated her life in the midst of her radical highs and lows, she knew that her situation could be much worse. The fact she could find hope amongst all that clutter was pretty intriguing to me. And that five minute conversation was the most interesting thing that happened at work today.