For a period of about 2 hours, Distri voluntarily worked retail by standing behind an unopenable cashier till at Metro City's local Supermarket. For what seemed like virtually an eternity, Distri eagerly awaited customers who might desire one of the static-images posing as actual food products on the store's wall and shelving units...Since no one else ever seemed to work the till at this store, Distri was ready to put her improvisational skills to work in order to prove that the customer was always right...Here are more historical details (and documentation) showing this performance event...
Most of the non-combat time in the Matrix is spent hanging in front of dreary graffiti-tagged walls or roaming around aimlessly with the vein hope of actually developing friendships and engaging in meaningful conversation with Metro City's citizens...In many cases, stores would be closed (boarded-up) and/or unoccupied...
It was only a matter of minutes before Distri began to seek out an impromptu performance-art intervention opportunity...
Uninspired, Distri roamed around Metro City looking for something to do as a "performance"...Just about every place seemed vacant and when a place was occupied, it usually was by an automated citizen (program) who may as well not have needed to have been there in the first place. One had to be very creative and use their agency very explicitly to achieve a sense of "reality" and "life" in this second-rate simulation of the real...Eventually, Distri had an idea while attempting a conversation with the news-stand vendor near the subway...
Distri decided to emulate the charming two-dimensional behaviour of the news-stand vendor by finding her own cash-register to occupy. As Metro City was an ill-conceived world with partially interactive possibilities and uninhabited (possibly evacuated) retail zones, there arose the possibility to perform as a volunteer clerk. Distri then looked for stores where she could work retail. Ideally, she would like to work at a record store...but all she managed to find this day was a supermarket-sized grocery store...Predictably, there was no one either in the store nor at a till so Distri ensured that at least she could work the till...maybe then, citizens would realize that the illusion of a genuinely functioning store (including a clerk posing as one of the NPCs) would become slightly more compelling than before...
Working as a clerk for hours on end without a customer in sight allowed Distri ample time to practice her combat moves. Distri discovered that strafing around the aisles helped ensure that no one was covertly hiding behind a shelf and stealing product from the store.
Distri spend most of the time memorizing each product for sale in order to devise creative excuses as to why none of this product could be peeled off the wall and dropped into a customer's inventory...Usually, the customer is always right but in instances like these, the Architect makes the rules...
Distri also spent time figuring out why there was a 1/2 price sign in the store. Wouldn't the customers expect a full refund once they found out that the product was merely a simulacrum? It probably did not matter anyway since Distri had no way to actually open and close the cash register, let alone collect money directly from customers.
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