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Jayce Walker didn’t hate his day job but he also didn’t particularly like it. It was, let’s face it, stunningly boring. Vinyl Solution was a tiny little shop down an alley in the city centre of Destiny City. How the owner even made enough money to pay the rent for the joint was beyond Jayce. On a good day they maxed out at about five customers. Old school records were either stunningly unpopular or else nobody just knew this shop existed (Jayce liked to think it was the former, I mean, hello, mobiles did all the work now.)

The shop was a cluttered nest of old vinyl records, stacked precariously here and there with very little organisation. When he’d first started Jayce had tried to make some sense of thing but had given up. He had a basic idea of where things were, particularly the popular things and that was it. He offered very little assistance to customers and let them wander about as he played games on his phone.

Today was a day like any other. He had a bowl of cereal in front of him at was staring at his phone. "Damn it Tubbs, stop eating all the food."

If someone from a customer service role one day made a list about the most annoying sentences customers could say, that one would have to be near the top. A spoonful of cereal halfway up to his mouth paused, some of the corn flakes falling back into the bowl.

Jayce eyed her with a deliberately blank look. “What do you need?” He was weighing up having to get up and let his cereal go soggy against helping her out and possibly getting her number because let’s face it, freckles were damn cute.

“I’m not on a break,” Jayce told her, while putting the spoon down and giving his cereal a last mournful look of farewell, knowing that by the time he returned it would be a soggy disaster. But he’d chosen cute girl over food and he now had to live with that decision.

“Billy Idol, yeah? We’ve got him in here somewhere,” he stood, stretching his arms over his head as he walked around the counter. “You know what he’s got already?” He waved her to follow as he moved towards one of the stacks, trying to remember where he’d last seen an Idol record hiding.

“Sure, sure,” Jayce said, only half listening to the spiel about her dad. These days he treated even the suggestion of happy family life with good deal of scepticism and annoyance. At least she knew what she was after and wasn’t going to have him dig around for ages, rejecting everything he found.

“Alrighttty, we should have at least one of those around here. Pretty sure I saw Cyberpunk under this pile.” As he spoke he simply pressed a hand against the stacked records and pushed it over. They toppled over and came to a rest messily against the next stack. At least now you could see what there was without lifting them all up.

“Nope, not here.” He move along and repeated the process. “Well here’s his christmas album. Yikes.” Happy Holidays it said on the cover. Billy Idol had turned around from his piano and was giving his fans his best serial killer grin.

“It’s all fine,” he told her, waving a hand as if to say ‘settle down girl, I know what I’m doing’, just as half a pile slid off the table and to the floor. Jayce simply stepped over it and moved on, winding his way through the cluttered room with absolutely no cares at all.

The christmas album was left there for Miranda to grab, Billy Idol grinning up at her.

“Different things. I play drums in a band but it’s mostly angry punk rock s**t from when we were fourteen and really depressed about life. These days I listen to club music and minimal techno. Ever heard of Droplex?”

He did not have a name-tag because name-tags were for losers.

"Nothing wrong with casual. It’s good to like a lot of different things. Met this guy once, all he would listen to was 60’s pop, absolutely nothing else. Literally nothing else. He was a complete wacko actually- aha!" He pulled out a record, brushed some dust off and held it up triumphantly for Miranda to see. It was Whiplash Smile, with Billy Idol staring moodily out at his fans.

"Jayce, by the way," he grinned as he held it out for her to take and then practically dropped it, letting her catch it or finish its descent to the floor, whatever came first as he turned quickly and marched back towards the counter with a, "hang on a sec."

He fiddled with his iPhone, connected to the speakers and a second later a song started to play. Well, it was the perfect time to share. "This is Droplex."

"You should. I’d offer you a half-price record but they aren’t exactly the type to bring their stuff out on old-school vinyl. Even if there has been a bit of a resurgence lately." Jayce left the music on and leaned his elbows on the counter. "We used to get just middle aged and old people in looking for stuff but now we get the hipsters wandering in as well. Bunch of wankers mostly. One of them spent ten minutes telling me about how becoming a Buddhist vegan had changed his life before I told him I didn’t give a ******** pushed himself straight and reached for his cereal, running the spoon through the corn flakes that were starting to look a little limp. "So you want me to find another record or is that good enough?"

"You should have seen his face, though." Jayce laughed, remembering cutting the guy off mid-sentence and the sheer outrage as he had stormed his vegan a** out. "I honestly don’t care what people do with their lives or what they eat, I don’t want to hear about it. My work day is boring enough as it is."

He reached for the records, entering their prices manually into the system because his boss still hadn’t figured out how useful barcodes could be. "I’ve never turned a free lunch down in my life." He grinned. That had been much easier than expected. "You cool to wait an hour until my official break? Oh and it’s $45 for the two. Cash or card?"