Games Extraordinaire vs. Unaccountability

I was all of 15 when I started “working” at Games Extraordinaire.

Working at the time consisted of this. Over the summer of 1989 my mom would drive me to Donelson, TN on Tuesday mornings before going to work herself. I would have breakfast at the Hardee’s which almost always consisted of a sausage biscuit and a Dr. Pepper. Just before 10 AM I would walk across Lebanon Pike and be let in by one of the managers or owners. Then UPS or a semi truck would pull up out front and unload two-ply corrugated cardboard boxes filled with comic books, t-shirts, posters, catalogs, and various and sundry other stuff.

In the back of the store was a game room. Not for big cabinet video games, but for banquet hall tables, some of which would have drab green painted sheets of oriented strand board atop them. These would on other occasions be used to lay out terrain features rendered in painted and flocked styrofoam, hills for miniature war games. A company called Southern Hobby supplied us with plastic bags for the comics. When we broke open the boxes, a manager, usually Stu Merrill, would check in each title against invoiced quantities, and we would bag them, closing the bags at a top flap with two pieces of horizontal scotch tape. “We” were customers named Larry, Gerald, Alan, sometimes Roger, and often me, and my first pay was merchandise. This was during the ‘90s “Collectors’ Boom” that followed Tim Burton’s Batman film and leading up to the “Death of Superman” story arc, Marvel’s bankruptcy, and the rise of a new, independent company based in La Jolla, CA called Image Comics.

Games Extraordinaire didn’t just carry comics. Our owners Gavin Gossett and the aforementioned Stu along with Stu’s brother/manager Phil and the equally eccentric Brian Kannard stocked and maintained the store with every conceivable exotic boardgame, pen and paper RPG, niche magazine, model kit, war game, golf disc, and sci-fi paperback you could imagine. Or perhaps you can’t imagine it, which is also okay.

Gavin and Stu learned a lot about business from another local company, Christie Cookie, where they met or at least first worked together. They brought every bit of their professional acumen to Games Extraordinaire, first in a small office suite on Donelson Pike, and at the end to Hermitage, TN, a few miles down the road. There the business still exists under a third set of owners as The Game Keep.

I got my first car while working at “Games Ex” and felt somewhat responsible as a key holder at the age of 17-18. So when I made mistakes, I took them seriously. One day I was called into the office to talk with Gav and Stu.

“You left the back door unsecured, again,” Gavin may have said. I was genuinely apologetic. I closed the store at 11 o’clock PM and was rarely out before midnight after counting the till. Sometimes I hung out with friends afterward, sometimes in the game room by the light of the Dr. Pepper machine and the big fluorescent hanging fixture over the paint rack, but most nights I drove home, sometimes rolling down car windows to keep myself awake. When I did, I’d hear the sound of train brakes from the CSX Radnor Yard. Where I live today I hear those brakes almost every night. It’s pure peace.

“This is our livelihood,” Stu may have explained. One of the two of them said both those lines, but I don’t remember who said which. I took the hits, never making excuses. I told them I’d rather be thought of as stupid than unethical. A long piece of hollow steel formed in a rectangle was used to bar this door. I walked across the street to Ace Hardware, bought a can of day-glow green spray paint, and in the gravel lot behind the building, I painted that bar. I never left the double, steel doors unsecured again.

At 23, I left hobby games for a moment and went to work for a big box electronics retailer. I’d survived the first change in ownership - after Nashville politics and prejudice played a role in padlocking the store. A sheriff’s man had chucked in admiration of my moxie as I made a bureaucrat execute due process and read his documents in full, still getting my boss’s permission before handing over the cash drawer. The pencil pusher wanted our money. I was going to make him work for it. I’d negotiated my pay with the new owner and toughed out the store’s humiliating decline into a ho-hum hobby shop. I had graduated college while working up to 30 hours a week. I was ready to move on to greener pastures.

But the pastures didn’t get greener. They just grayed.

Sure, I had direct deposit and healthcare benefit. But I also had to deal, for the first time, with the gap between my professionalism and a total lack of accountability on the part of other staff.

Specifically, we got two trucks a week. Each member of the team I was on was supposed to work one of these two trucks, but they didn’t. I worked every truck, one Tuesday and one Thursday. Sometimes one of my coworkers would work 20 or so minutes of the required hour. The warehouse managers in my first store were speed users who would come back in from breaks sweating profusely. The more brute of the two took to throwing 19” TV set boxes at me - and this was before flat-panel televisions - rather than rolling them down a snakelike conveyor before I could stack them on palates. Thankfully I caught on without dropping one.

I also had to push a broom which I complained about to my friend Tracy. “You’ll either figure out you don’t like working, or that the body is made for work,” was his sage advice. I was also lucky to have an appliance manager named Bob who showed me how to actually use a broom and a pan. Those lessons are ones I’ve applied countless times, both literally and metaphorically, across the subsequent 20+ years.

Others didn’t learn their lesson. Maybe they went on to great things, but the humility it took to work a truck or sweep the “speed lanes” in a store, to vacuum, to clean a toilet when it needed it, and to, imagine this, Serve People, was something that would never leave me. It reflects in my attitude toward my customers and direct reports today.

Unfortunately, the current business climate is not interested in the hard work of teaching young people life lessons. It’s only interested in keeping them at their stations for close to the allotted hours and worse yet, rewarding them for sub-par labor, and coddling them when they complain. Like back in the big box days, it’s still the reliable, stand-up employees who bear the brunt. And they usually can’t be promoted because they are too valuable in their positions. Adjusted for inflation, companies want to pay people $4 more per hour than they are worth as we return to manual labor after the pandemic - and many people aren’t heading back to work. A recent interaction with a professional resulted in something like this statement: “these people can’t call themselves [role name] because their labor doesn’t merit the job description.” This was absolutely spot on.

I grew not just professionally but as a person because I was held to a high standard of conduct and corrected when I messed up. I do my work with humility and know my skills, which are substantial. We are failing our young people by not teaching them the same lessons today.

Games Extraordinaire spoiled me, not by papering me, but by surrounding me with people who had pride in their labor and understood the value of teamwork. I do my best to foster that in my direct reports today. I communicate expectations to them and within their range of ownership, reward them with greater responsibility and opportunity. This latest generation has a LOT of star people in it - people who will go on to achieve and thrive in their professional lives. I say with a small sense of pride that I’ve given three people a livelihood in the last 10 years of my career and that I have influenced others. I learned confidence through work in ways I discovered in no other avenue in life. It gave me tenacity and resolve. It gave me the persistence to be a better father, volunteer, and problem solver. It made me a better person.

Let’s not divorce work ethic from value as a person. Let’s not fall into the trap of saying that our social lives and not our professionalism define our moral worth. Let’s not invest our belief in the notion that being a good employee is being scammed or that employers are all here to take advantage of our labor. This is a path to unrestrained failure.

Let’s do our best together in the workplace and let that excellence spread to the rest of our lives.

Thanks to Gavin and Stu for giving me that second chance. It’s lasted me a lifetime.