Inuvik (Feb 25/05) - It's a scenario Video Effects proprietor Mike Lindsay is all too familiar with.

Customer rents a stack of video games, gets sucked into a parallel universe of Play Station mayhem and weeks later comes out of the trance and returns the games late. Very late.

The result: a gargantuan fine no mere mortal could imagine. But when you are in the business of dealing in fantasy and escapism, it comes with the territory.

"It happened a couple of weeks back," said Lindsay of a customer who embarked on such a virtual reality journey. "There's about $1,400 showing on his account now and I'll have to adjust it, you know, because there's no way he's going to pay it and I wouldn't expect it."

Customers such as these are rare. It is the ones who owe $50 here and $70 there which really add up, to the tune of more than $20,000 in outstanding fines Lindsay carries on his books from month to month.

"It's definitely frustrating as nobody wants to have that much in accounts receivable," said Lindsay, who stocks about 6,000 titles at his store.

When asked if he thought posting a list of delinquent customers might help the cause, Linsday chuckled.

"That would be too long of a list."

For Lindsay, who's owned the store since 1991, a bigger problem is the loss of potential rentals by customers looking for a video that seems to be lost in space.

Thinking about the recent decision by mega-chain Blockbuster to discontinue its late fees, Lindsay explained that the store is really selling the video if the late fee equals the value of the rented item.

And with the number of customers racking up the late charges at Video Effects, the store could run out of titles pretty quickly if that policy were employed regularly. At the moment, customers with late charges exceeding $30 are asked to bring their amount under that mark before they can rent again.

"I try to be fair and suggest to those customers to contribute their change to the late fee and before you know it, they've cleared their account," Lindsay said.