Saturday, April 29, 2006

Scattershot.

This will be a compendium of various indignities that I have suffered on the job since I last saw fit to post here on the Girls in Skirts on Ladders complaintlog, along with assorted statistics related to the bookselling trade. It is entirely possible that this is the last entry on said complaintlog. If anyone is wondering if I will ever get around to posting another podcast, the answer is yes. Thank you for downloading.

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Man comes in looking for a copy of the study guide for the exam to become subway track worker. Man appears to be drunk.
When the awful truth, that we have run out of said study guides given that the exam is in like two days, comes out, man treats me to a diatribe about how "the MTA won't give a guy a chance" and "they just give all the jobs to minorities." I refrained from suggesting that he find a minority track worker and see if he has a copy of the study guide that he'd be willing to sell, but just barely.

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Woman wants to know if the paperback version of The Da Vinci Code is shorter than the hardcover. No, I say, it's the same book. How'd they get it so much smaller, she wants to know. A detailed discussion of advanced publishing concepts -- such as margins, font size, and spacing -- follows. I end up not having to grab a copy of the hardcover edition for a side-by-side comparison, but that spectre loomed over the entire conversation, you can be sure.

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Missed opportunity:

A bald woman with teeth sticking out at odd angles from her blackpink gums tries to hand me a tattered composition notebook with her "really good writing" contained within. She wants someone from the store to read her poetry so she can get a "professional opinion" before, presumably, submitting it to a publisher. I cut her off and tell her that nobody who works at the store is a "professional" in publishing and that she should go to the second floor and find the Poet's Marketplace book that we always stock.

"So nobody here is available to read it," she asks.

"No," I reply.

"Someone at 82nd Street read it last time I went in there," she says.

Note to customers and potential customers: saying "the other store said I could" or any variant thereof is the equivalent of waving a red cape in front of my face, begging me to make you look like a fucking Goya painting. "That may well be," I reply, "but nobody here is going to. Sorry."

She gives me a disbelieving look and heads to the second floor. In that instant I realize that I should have humored her and checked out the poetry in her notebook, which was doubtlessly FUCKING HILARIOUS. When will I ever learn that sometimes it pays to humor the insane?

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Me: "Hi, can I help you."

Customer with two annoying dogs: "......"

Me: "........caaaan I help you...?"

Customer with two annoying dogs: "I like the European touch."

Customer then walked away from me and over to another employee, who presumably was better able to help her find her Paul Newman cookbook. I remain baffled by whatever the hell transpired there.

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Customer: "Do you have [Obscure Textbook That a General Interest Bookstore Would Never Carry In a Million Years]?

Me: "No, we don't carry textbooks here, you need to go to the Barnes & Noble textbook store for that."

Customer: "I was just there, they sent me here."1

REPEAT EIGHT MILLION TIMES.

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Number of special-ordered books that I have "accidentally" misplaced for customers who treated me like shit: countless. Number of phone numbers I have "accidentally" entered incorrectly into the system, ensuring that customer who acted like an asshole will never get the call informing him that his special order is in: countless. Here's a tip, Barnes & Noble customer: be polite, no matter what, and especially when you're calling to check on the status of your special order despite having been told that WE WILL CALL YOU when it comes in. Your attitude is what determines whether or not I will go to the basement and check and see if we've actually received the book you desperately need for your class, and upon finding it whether or not I will place it in a stack of books to be returned to the publisher. Just yesterday I ensured that a woman will not get a book that she needs for a class on Monday until well into next week. Do I feel bad? Not even a little bit. Because she made the decision to treat me as if I am not a human being. Fuck her.

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Sometimes you have to lie to the insane. The woman a coworker unimaginatively refers to as "Listy" is someone I've dealt with before: she is completely insane, and this insanity manifests itself in part in a desire to come into my store and request printed information about books on a wide variety of unrelated topics. These days, I just lie to her. A few weeks ago, all the printers in the store were broken. The next time, somebody'd stolen all the toner. After that, our paper supplier went out of business. Next time, I'm going to try a supernatural explanation and see how it flies.

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It is far too late for me to be awake. Good night, my lovelies. I may be back, I may not be.

1 A depresingly common refrain, and one that never fails to piss me off. THANK YOU BARNES AND NOBLE TEXTBOOK STORE EMPLOYEES FOR REFERRING PEOPLE TO ME FOR THEIR OBSCURE TEXTBOOK AND LAB MANUAL NEEDS. Idiots.