The following event was related to me by a current employee who chooses to remain nameless.
In preparation for the upcoming digital transition several years ago, we were inundated with new product that had to be setup by overnight crews. These overnight crews did resets and hooked displays up so that they could be demoed on the sales floor to customers. In all retail stores, the server room is the room that also holds the television feed, meaning you can put in a DVD in a designated machine and all the TV's connected to the feed will broadcast the DVD in store. It's a very simple setup.
Len's favorite thing next to foaming over trains was trying to sell videos of his shit to employees. He would bring in a ratty cardboard box that had grease stains all over it. Almost all of his videos were on VHS despite DVD being a more numerous medium and VHS players were all but nearly fazed out in the store. It was a disorganized mess that looked like someone's trash. Videos were hand written in a mix of pen and magic marker with odd names that didn't adequately describe what was on the tape.
To convince the store to buy his shit, he opened a brand new DVD/VHS combo player that was being saved for a customer, store used it, and tried to hook it up to the television feed in the server room. What followed was an eyewitness account:
“To put it bluntly; it was horrifying and perverse. What appeared on the screens in midday was a cacophony of screeching audio and train sounds, intermittently scattered with long winded close-ups of women walking down the street or in yards, going about their daily lives. It was disgusting and creepy. An employee shut it off after five minutes. Had we known what was going on from the beginning, we'd have never let it happen."
Turns out the server room door is normally locked but a contractor working on the racks propped it open because he was doing work in and out of the room. When Len saw the electronics employee go to the server room, he waddled after him, telling him not to turn it off his magnum opus. Despite turning it off, the tape was stuck inside the DVD/VHS player, effectively ruining it. The thought was to sell it to the customer at a discount but it was broke and we would be receiving no more of that particular model.
Len then tried to say that he was owed $20 dollars for the cost of the tape. He was told to take his box back to his car and finish his shift. When Len went to go get his trash box, someone had written “JOURNEY UP MY ASS PRODUCTIONS” in black permanent marker all over it. He looked like he was going to cry but he took his box to his car and finished his shift in silence.
