I declare today "Salmon Day".

You know, it's where you fight your way upstream only to get fucked and die anyway. It's been a long week even if work has been relatively well-behaved.

Only relatively however. Heavens forefend the need to break out some serious armaments between my pronouncement and my hoped for rested and refreshed close of weekend.

Currently, I've a mystery to ponder. A few days hence, a customer came in and rented a movie. Not too long ago, that customer returned their rental. The movie they returned was not listed as being out. Whereupon I looked up the customer and lo and behold discover the video they are listed as having out. The movie slot for the movie listed as being out had the right movie in it. The slot for the movie returned was empty. The movie names are not very similar. The inventory numbers for the two movies are not similar either.

So how in the nine whipped creamy layers of Hell did we manage to create this circumstance?!

My initial thought was that they had rented the other title either prior or subsequent to the one in the system. Rushing, the clerk returned VidOne when they thought they were returning VidTwo, thus twisting the records and movies on loan.

However, this is this particular customer's first rental. No other movie to confuse it with.

What about involving another customer?

Nope. It wasn't rented by anyone else in the necessary time period. So another theory bites the dust.

At this point, I think the most plausible hypothesis is that they brought up two movies to rent, but only decided to rent one. In addition, the clerk would have locked one of the inventory numbers in mind while looking which unfortunately was the movie the customer didn't select. The clerk would also have failed to check the title on the disk against the rental slip. Since the customer had brought both up to the counter in the first place, they might not notice or care that the title was different from the slip.

Of course, this theory hangs upon several assumptions, however plausible, and as such could hold no resemblance to reality.

I like to think of it this way; Professionals are trained and thus predictable, but the world is full of amateurs.