Transition.
There are idiots and assholes on both sides of NYC's transit strike, so blaming one side or the other seems kind of pointless. Yes, the offer that Transit Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Touissant1 walked away from seems pretty damn good to, say, someone with a college degree barely scraping by at a retail job; the MTA caved on many of its demands (including the raising of the retirement age that TWU 100 found so odious) and offered respectable compromises on many of the others. And yes, every single time -- let me emphazise this: Every. Single. Time. -- I have dealt with a transit worker, I have been met by the sort of surly, utterly uncalled for rudeness and hostility that I, my perceptions having been shaped by the various mass media that raised me, had initially expected from New York's general population, a populace which I in general find no more rude than anywhere else I've lived2. "Oh," I thought after having to ask a simple question of a booth attendant shortly after moving here, "that's where people get the idea that all New Yorkers are assholes3.
At the same time, the MTA is well known for being corrupt and incompetent, so I understand why the union rank and file4 thinks the MTA is sitting on a big pile of money and refusing to share with them: the MTA has done little to earn their trust, or the trust of anyone else for that matter. That said, people whose arguments for the strikers amount to little more than pointing out the MTA's billion-dollar surplus should really get a handle on the fact that the surplus is dwarfed by the staggering budget gaps the MTA faces in the next few years. Obviously the MTA has been hugely mismanaged, which is exactly why they're trying to cut costs, and unfortunately some of that is going to hit the rank and file laborers. That's just the way it goes. If dad blows the family's savings in Vegas, Tommy doesn't get an Xbox 360 for Christmas. It's not Tommy's fault, but them's the breaks.
As for the strike itself, though, I think it's a really awful thing to do to the millions of people who ride the trains to work everyday, and in particular the working poor who make far less money than even the lowest-paid transit employees. Just today, as I worked at a different B & N5 than the one I normally work at because it's closer to my home, I spoke to an employee who was freaking out because she can't afford to take a cab to work every day and she can't find anyone to carpool with. I assure you that she makes far less than a transit worker, and she's completely fucked by this strike.
Yes, that's right, faithful readers: a new store. A new layout. A new info desk. New co-workers. New managers. New horizons! Yes, well, it wasn't quite as exciting as all that. The store I worked at today, and will presumably be working at for the duration of the strike, is much smaller than the one I normally work at (I joked with one new co-worker buddy that I was ill-equipped to deal with fewer than four floors), with a much smaller selection and much fewer shoppers6.
What the customers lacked in numbers, though, they made up for in sheer stupidity. Maybe I'm imagining this, but, and I had my opinion seconded by someone who has worked both at this store and others in Manhattan, the customers at the new store were noticeably dumber than the ones I deal with at my normal place of employment. Dumber and much more rude. I know it's the holidays and all, but I worked Christmas at my regular store last year and it was nowhere near as bad. People coming in with impossibly broad requests like "What Italian cookbooks do you have?" People who are shocked when we have the book that a major motion picture was based on, or that Oprah's Book Club is reading7. People who call to ask how to get into Manhattan8, or to get a listing of every single audiobook in the store, or to get a detailed survey of the items for sale in the cafe. In short, the kind of pure nimroddery9 that I never have to deal with at my regular store.
I wish I could say that this was limited to the customers, but the sad truth is that a good number of the employees were, at best, lacking knowledge. To be fair, some of them were surely seasonal hires and/or people who, like me, were working their first day in an unfamiliar store. But at least one of them was not, and he was the guy who stood out. The guy who was clueless when asked about major bestsellers like Freakonomics and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It's not just that he didn't know where they were in the store, which would have been excusable, sort of; he had no idea what the books were. He also responded to the perennial question "Is The Da Vinci Code out in paperback?" with "Well, of course it is!!" I contemplated letting him look all over the floor for it, but decided to break in and inform him and the customer that The Da Vinci Code is not in paperback, and we have no idea when it will be. Really, we don't. Stop asking.
This was not the first or last time I had to break in because a co-worker didn't know what he or she was talking about. Granted, this happens a lot at my other store, too, but at the new place it was out of control. I was correcting people on spelling, pointing out bestsellers that were like four feet to our right, answering questions for customers who had a description of the book but not the title or author...it was kind of exhusting. At one point, one of the employees asked me what store I was from. After I told him, he asked if, at that store, I worked at the info desk or in the cookbooks. "Info," I responded after pausing for a second to wonder what made this guy think I worked in the cookbooks section. Later, I remembered that I'd stepped in to help him look up a book for a customer after his spelling abilities had proved lacking: The Mad Cook of Pymatuning by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is not a cookbook10.
My favorite customer of the day was the guy who was looking for Danielle Steel's Echoes. Because of his accent, an impossibly irritating mixture of Italian and Retard11, I thought he was saying "ankles" at first. While I was looking for what I knew couldn't possibly be Danielle Steel's Ankles, I overheard the following conversation between him and his companion:
Not-Actually-Retarded: "She should write a book about being a porn star!"
Companion, Also Not Retarded: "She was a porn star?"
Not-Actually-Retarded: "Yeah, she made some movies."
I did the research, dear reader, because I care about you, and the veracity of the information I present to you here. I did a whole three minutes of research on Google, and can state with confidence that Danielle Steel was never a porn star. There are Danielles in the porn industry, and there are Steels12, but the only facial Danielle Steel has ever received, at least as far as the viewing public is concerned, took place at a salon.
Not-Actually-Retarded returned a little later to ask whether the Stephen King hardcover he had pulled off a display was his most recent book. I'm pretty sure that the hardcover in question was actually a special edition of a previously released book, but I guessed that the distinction would be lost on the guy and answered in the affirmative. He responded by pumping his fist and shouting "Yes!" Here's hoping he doesn't already have the book.
Tomorrow, I return to my adoptive store, hopefully for the last time. Until then, do me a favor and cherish your transportation options, whatever they may be.
1 Who is, make no mistake, a flaming asshole of the highest order, whose ludicrous rhetorical excesses mark him as being cut from the same cloth as one G. W. Bush.
2 If, understandably, higher strung.
3 Cab drivers, too.
4 Note that I say nothing about Mr. Touissant, who I don't think for a second actually believes his own rhetoric.
5 Since starting this blog, I've been indirect about saying which monolithic bookstore chain I work for, but fuck it, it's not like it's that hard to figure out, and the only people who read this, assuming anyone does, are my friends anyway.
6 It's not inconceivable that the strike actually helped business at the store, since presumably lots of people who normally would've gone to the much bigger and better BNs in Manhattan were forced to shop in the neighborhood. The people who worked there seemed to be unprepared for it; I actually forgot the rules of polite society and laughed in a manager's face when she described as "crazy" a level of business that would barely be noticed at my store.
7 Memoirs of a Geisha and A Million Little Pieces, respectively. As a side note, the ever-popular pastime of mangling the title of the latter book took on unexpected new life today when, for the first time in a good while, I heard a variation on the title I hadn't heard before: "A Million Shattered Pieces." As you can surely imagine, the rest of the day was kind of boring after that kind of excitement.
8 After being briefly taken aback that someone would ask me that, I almost -- almost -- responded with "vroom vroom!"
9 Did I just make up a new word? I think I did.
10 My sense of fairness compels me to point out that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a fairly little-known book by a fairly little-known author, but at the same time I have to wonder why anyone would think that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a likely title for a cookbook.
11 He did not, of course, appear to actually be retarded. I like to think that if he had appeared so, I would refrain from mocking him. Unless it was really, really funny.
12 And Steeles.
At the same time, the MTA is well known for being corrupt and incompetent, so I understand why the union rank and file4 thinks the MTA is sitting on a big pile of money and refusing to share with them: the MTA has done little to earn their trust, or the trust of anyone else for that matter. That said, people whose arguments for the strikers amount to little more than pointing out the MTA's billion-dollar surplus should really get a handle on the fact that the surplus is dwarfed by the staggering budget gaps the MTA faces in the next few years. Obviously the MTA has been hugely mismanaged, which is exactly why they're trying to cut costs, and unfortunately some of that is going to hit the rank and file laborers. That's just the way it goes. If dad blows the family's savings in Vegas, Tommy doesn't get an Xbox 360 for Christmas. It's not Tommy's fault, but them's the breaks.
As for the strike itself, though, I think it's a really awful thing to do to the millions of people who ride the trains to work everyday, and in particular the working poor who make far less money than even the lowest-paid transit employees. Just today, as I worked at a different B & N5 than the one I normally work at because it's closer to my home, I spoke to an employee who was freaking out because she can't afford to take a cab to work every day and she can't find anyone to carpool with. I assure you that she makes far less than a transit worker, and she's completely fucked by this strike.
Yes, that's right, faithful readers: a new store. A new layout. A new info desk. New co-workers. New managers. New horizons! Yes, well, it wasn't quite as exciting as all that. The store I worked at today, and will presumably be working at for the duration of the strike, is much smaller than the one I normally work at (I joked with one new co-worker buddy that I was ill-equipped to deal with fewer than four floors), with a much smaller selection and much fewer shoppers6.
What the customers lacked in numbers, though, they made up for in sheer stupidity. Maybe I'm imagining this, but, and I had my opinion seconded by someone who has worked both at this store and others in Manhattan, the customers at the new store were noticeably dumber than the ones I deal with at my normal place of employment. Dumber and much more rude. I know it's the holidays and all, but I worked Christmas at my regular store last year and it was nowhere near as bad. People coming in with impossibly broad requests like "What Italian cookbooks do you have?" People who are shocked when we have the book that a major motion picture was based on, or that Oprah's Book Club is reading7. People who call to ask how to get into Manhattan8, or to get a listing of every single audiobook in the store, or to get a detailed survey of the items for sale in the cafe. In short, the kind of pure nimroddery9 that I never have to deal with at my regular store.
I wish I could say that this was limited to the customers, but the sad truth is that a good number of the employees were, at best, lacking knowledge. To be fair, some of them were surely seasonal hires and/or people who, like me, were working their first day in an unfamiliar store. But at least one of them was not, and he was the guy who stood out. The guy who was clueless when asked about major bestsellers like Freakonomics and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It's not just that he didn't know where they were in the store, which would have been excusable, sort of; he had no idea what the books were. He also responded to the perennial question "Is The Da Vinci Code out in paperback?" with "Well, of course it is!!" I contemplated letting him look all over the floor for it, but decided to break in and inform him and the customer that The Da Vinci Code is not in paperback, and we have no idea when it will be. Really, we don't. Stop asking.
This was not the first or last time I had to break in because a co-worker didn't know what he or she was talking about. Granted, this happens a lot at my other store, too, but at the new place it was out of control. I was correcting people on spelling, pointing out bestsellers that were like four feet to our right, answering questions for customers who had a description of the book but not the title or author...it was kind of exhusting. At one point, one of the employees asked me what store I was from. After I told him, he asked if, at that store, I worked at the info desk or in the cookbooks. "Info," I responded after pausing for a second to wonder what made this guy think I worked in the cookbooks section. Later, I remembered that I'd stepped in to help him look up a book for a customer after his spelling abilities had proved lacking: The Mad Cook of Pymatuning by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is not a cookbook10.
My favorite customer of the day was the guy who was looking for Danielle Steel's Echoes. Because of his accent, an impossibly irritating mixture of Italian and Retard11, I thought he was saying "ankles" at first. While I was looking for what I knew couldn't possibly be Danielle Steel's Ankles, I overheard the following conversation between him and his companion:
Not-Actually-Retarded: "She should write a book about being a porn star!"
Companion, Also Not Retarded: "She was a porn star?"
Not-Actually-Retarded: "Yeah, she made some movies."
I did the research, dear reader, because I care about you, and the veracity of the information I present to you here. I did a whole three minutes of research on Google, and can state with confidence that Danielle Steel was never a porn star. There are Danielles in the porn industry, and there are Steels12, but the only facial Danielle Steel has ever received, at least as far as the viewing public is concerned, took place at a salon.
Not-Actually-Retarded returned a little later to ask whether the Stephen King hardcover he had pulled off a display was his most recent book. I'm pretty sure that the hardcover in question was actually a special edition of a previously released book, but I guessed that the distinction would be lost on the guy and answered in the affirmative. He responded by pumping his fist and shouting "Yes!" Here's hoping he doesn't already have the book.
Tomorrow, I return to my adoptive store, hopefully for the last time. Until then, do me a favor and cherish your transportation options, whatever they may be.
1 Who is, make no mistake, a flaming asshole of the highest order, whose ludicrous rhetorical excesses mark him as being cut from the same cloth as one G. W. Bush.
2 If, understandably, higher strung.
3 Cab drivers, too.
4 Note that I say nothing about Mr. Touissant, who I don't think for a second actually believes his own rhetoric.
5 Since starting this blog, I've been indirect about saying which monolithic bookstore chain I work for, but fuck it, it's not like it's that hard to figure out, and the only people who read this, assuming anyone does, are my friends anyway.
6 It's not inconceivable that the strike actually helped business at the store, since presumably lots of people who normally would've gone to the much bigger and better BNs in Manhattan were forced to shop in the neighborhood. The people who worked there seemed to be unprepared for it; I actually forgot the rules of polite society and laughed in a manager's face when she described as "crazy" a level of business that would barely be noticed at my store.
7 Memoirs of a Geisha and A Million Little Pieces, respectively. As a side note, the ever-popular pastime of mangling the title of the latter book took on unexpected new life today when, for the first time in a good while, I heard a variation on the title I hadn't heard before: "A Million Shattered Pieces." As you can surely imagine, the rest of the day was kind of boring after that kind of excitement.
8 After being briefly taken aback that someone would ask me that, I almost -- almost -- responded with "vroom vroom!"
9 Did I just make up a new word? I think I did.
10 My sense of fairness compels me to point out that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a fairly little-known book by a fairly little-known author, but at the same time I have to wonder why anyone would think that The Mad Cook of Pymatuning is a likely title for a cookbook.
11 He did not, of course, appear to actually be retarded. I like to think that if he had appeared so, I would refrain from mocking him. Unless it was really, really funny.
12 And Steeles.
posted by Dktr. Blasphemy at 10:15 PM
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