This post is a continuation of some of the memories I have from working at Radio Shack while I was in college.

I have been posting a new set of stories every week or so.

I worked at Radio Shack for three years and like most jobs, there were times when things were busy and times when things were kind of dead.

While our manager would have liked us to pick up the mantra "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean", we found other ways to keep ourselves entertained...

The Radio Shack I worked at was in a strip mall, settled between two other businesses. One was a furniture store and the other was a dry cleaning company. Back when cordless phones were really starting to become popular, there weren't as many restrictions on the frequency bands as there are now.

We would often be able to listen in to the phone conversations that they were having in the furniture store next door just by turning on one of our police scanners and tuning it to the proper frequency.

The dry cleaner was just beyond the wall on the other side of the store. Our store was much longer than it was wide so you could probably cover the distance from one wall to the other in 15 or less steps.

It just happend to be that the same wall we shared with the dry cleaner was the home audio and car stereo wall. This was right around the same time that surround sound systems were becoming popular along with having subwoofers in your car.

The manager got countless complaints from the dry cleaner that we were playing music too loudly in the evenings. We always explained to the manager that we were demo'ing the sound systems for a customer, whether we really were or not.

This was also right around the time that the smaller form factor satellite dishes were getting popular. We had a VHS cassette tape that we were supposed to play on the TV's called Radio Shack TV. Many nights you could find us hanging out around the large 27" TV at the front of the store watching movies though.

There was also a period of time that we started selling Microsoft Network(MSN) Dial up. This was a time well before high speed Internet and up until that point the only computer in the store with an Internet connection was the managers computer in the back where we would use a modem to transfer our sales to the corporate headquarters each night.

Several of the workers had dial up at home, but we wanted to be able to check our email and that sort of thing at work, so we found an old fax line that wasn't being used hidden under one of the baseboards. We then ran a line under the carpet tiles to the middle of the sales floor where a computer was. Finally, we chiselled out a section of the concrete under the floor tiles so we could hide the phone jack.

There really wasn't much to do on the Internet back then, but we had a connection whenever we wanted it and the manager wasn't around. In our defense, it also helped being able to show customers what kind of speeds and experience they could expect if they signed up for the service.

As someone mentioned in a comment on one of my earlier posts, there was always a never ending stream of parts and components that we were able to play with and create things. Additionally anytime a new product came in we were expected to get familiar with it so we could sell it better.

I remember when the Lineum line of speakers came out, we had lots of fun putting them through their paces. I still have a small set of the bookshelf speakers that I use to this day with my Radio Shack turntable and stereo receiver.

Despite the fun times we had at Radio Shack, there were also some not so great times. I will get into those in my post next week!

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