Sympathy pains.

Quote of the day, courtesy of Store Manager Bob:

"I feel sorry for my daughter's vagina."

There is context here, but I feel like letting the statement hang there in all its contextless horror.

Customer Freudian slip #343

Guy comes up to the desk and asks me where he can find Giada De Laurentiis's second cookbook.

I know, because it is on the bestseller list, that he is referring to this book:



I walk him over to the bestseller wall and hand him the book.

He grabs it and asks, "And this is her naked cookbook? Er, second cookbook?"

Yeah, dude. Hope the wife enjoys the book!

ADDENDUM: New old post from July of last year. Get your Potter on.

A reasonable guide to soft theft.

I am going to give you advice tonight, because it is late and I am in a benevolent mood.

If you've ever visited a bookstore, you may have noted the presence of a "bargain" section where books are sold for drastically discounted prices. If this was at a Barnes & Noble, you may have thought, "Wow, these stickers with the reduced price come right off! I wonder if anyone would notice me pulling the sticker off this book and putting it on a book I actually want to buy?"

Here are a few things to consider when you attempt this scam:

1. Don't be greedy. Saturday night, a guy in a pink shirt got into a dispute with a cashier and, eventually, a manager over the price of a book that had a $1.99 sticker on it. This was a sticker with a handwritten price on it, sans barcode. If you're trying to scam BN by affixing a reduced price sticker to a non-reduced book, use one of the stickers that has a barcode on it and hope that the cashier doesn't notice that the book that rings up is not the book he scanned. The barcoded stickers are generally in the $4.98 - $6.98 range, so you'll pay more, but if your cashier is unobservant you'll still get a substantial discount. This leads us to the next tip.

2. Choose your book(s) carefully. Pink Shirt was arguing about You: The Owner's Manual, a book that, propelled by the authors' repeat appearances on Oprah, is currently ON THE FUCKING BESTSELLER LIST. Now, I know that many of you think that retail employees are idiots, but while not every person working at my store can be as brilliant as I, there isn't a single cashier in the place who would blithely accept the presence of a $1.99 sticker on that book. The very idea that You: The Owner's Manual would be discounted so heavily is preposterous to anyone who has spent more than an hour on the job. We are not stupid. We know what the popular books are. One of the main reasons I am so confident that Pink Shirt was trying to scam us -- as opposed to having just innocently picked up a mislabeled book -- is that he made the ludicrous claim that he'd taken the book from a big stack of similarly marked-down copies of You in the bargain section¹. Right.

3. If you're going to try to get your way by being intimidating, don't wear a pink shirt. Eventually the conflict between Pinky and the cashier made its way over to the customer service desk. When the manager on duty politely explained to him that the book was mislabeled and she couldn't sell it to him for the $1.99 on the sticker, he stopped her and said, "I'm going to talk. When I'm done talking, then you can talk." The manager told him to stop being rude, to which he retorted, "I'm not being rude." There followed an account of his taking the book to the registers and being met with skeptcism from both the cashier and her manager, who according to him gave him conflicting reasons for the book not being discounted. None of which matters, of course; the book isn't $1.99, period. But Pinky was either really that much of a dick or he was working with the assumption that if he was not just rude but a massive, gaping asshole, he would get what he wanted. The problem with this approach is that it generally only works when your request is kinda sorta reasonable, like say returning a book for a full refund a week later than is allowed by the return policy. Getting a 92% discount on a current bestseller does not fall into the category of a reasonable request. Also, let me reiterate that pink is not the color to wear when you try this.

4. Don't act guilty. One of the first things Pinky said to the manager was, "Are you accusing me of putting the sticker on the book?" The manager had done no such thing², so his bringing it up unprovoked can safely be considered what poker players refer to as a "tell". Honestly, I was expecting him to try to play the dreaded "race card" (he was black), especially as it became more and more clear that his plan wasn't going to work.

I really feel like I'm failing to convey what a complete and total asshole this guy was, and that's a shame because I sincerely think that I have never, at any job I've ever worked, witnessed a customer treat the employees at a store so poorly. Just standing there listening to the way he was carrying on, I was getting so angry that I was shaking; if I'd had to actually deal with him in any way, it would have been bad. Really, really bad. To give you an idea of the authority this guy thought he had: once the presence of the cashier was no longer required, the manager sent her back to cash, to which Pinky demanded, "You don't send her away while I'm talking!" Of course, he wasn't in control of the situation even a little bit, and so his impotent command fell on deaf ears, but the sheer unmitigated gall of it still pisses me off, hours after the fact.

You've probably guessed that Pinky did not get his copy of You: The Owner's Manual for the price to which he felt he was entitled. Actual quote: "So, I just waited fifteen minutes for nothing." Awwwwww. Poor bay-beeeeee. Enjoy being followed by the undercover security guards next time you're in the store, moron.

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¹ The other main reason is that the security guards knew he was stealing but couldn't do anything about it because they lost track of him for a minute and therefore hadn't seen the process of his thievery from beginning to end, as required.
² Although, as previously noted, it was fairly obvious that he had.

"How come Patsy Cline don't make records no more?"

I am going to chalk up today's failure to locate the new Roberto Clemente biography despite there being a million copies on display on the bestseller wall to being disoriented by the customer's request for "Roberto Clemente's new book," as if Clemente himself had written it after being dead for thirty-five years. The alternative is grim acknowledgment that yes, my brain is dying and there is nothing I can do about it. I had to think really hard about how to spell "acknowledgment," by the way.

Another new old post: near fisticuffs and full-blown annoyance from August of last year. Those were the days, alright.

Peaks and valleys.

This month's staff recommendation:



We're doomed. DOOMED.

The last minute.

Imagine that you're a middle-aged academic¹. Imagine that you have a paper to present on May 4th, and for that paper you need this book:



Now, imagine that it's May 3rd. You purchased the book weeks ago to make sure you'd have it, right? Your paper is ready to go and you're using these last few hours to do some last-minute fine tuning, right?

Not if you're imagining you're the woman with the lazy eye who came into the store on Wednesday, May 3rd. If you're imagining you're her, you're imagining that you're frantically scrambling to find the book the day before you absolutely need it or unimaginable things will surely happen.

As a college professor, the last thing one should probably do is take after one's students, but this is exactly what Prof. Lazy Eye did, waiting until the last minute before coming into the store and basically demanding that we figure out some way to get a book for which, at the point in which I entered the story, she and the staff of the art section had already thoroughly scoured the sales floor. Undaunted, she approached the customer service desk and was fortunately met not by me but by a manager, Uncle Jesse², who explained to her that sometimes the computer will show, as in this case, a single copy of a book that cannot be found in the store for any number of reasons; as I'd previously explained to "Audrey Gronnit", it might be a computer error, the book might be on hold for a customer, a customer might be holding it right now, it might be in receiving waiting to get sent back to the publisher, etc.

Upon hearing that the book might be on hold for someone else, Prof. Lazy Eye's first response was, "Well, if it's on hold for someone can't you just get it and sell it to me?"

I wasn't even directly involved in the transaction and I was already prepared to feed this woman her heart. Uncle Jesse, however, is unflappable in these situations, which I suppose is one of the reasons that he is Management Material and I am not. He patiently explained that we do not put books on hold for people and then just up and sell them to someone else, to which her response was, "There has to be a way to do this. Think this through for me. I'm desperate."

The astute among you may have figured out that there was nothing we could do. I never cease to be astounded by people who don't understand that there needn't be a way to get them their books in the time frame they need. Usually, though, the you have to get this book for me i need it for a paper thats due tomorrow ohgodohgodohgod freakouts come from college students. This is a COLLEGE PROFESSOR. And as I walked up the escalator, dispatched by Uncle Jesse to check the return cart in the art section to see if it was there, my only wish was for this fucking idiot to leave the store without the book she so desperately needed.

I needn't have worried. One of the art section employees informed me that the book was definitely not anywhere on the sales floor and there was no point in wasting my time looking for it. That was good enough for me, as he had already spent quite some time looking for the book, during which time Prof. Lazy Eye had cussed him out for his inability to locate the book that the computer probably still says is in the store. If I have little patience for people who flip out when they put something off until the last minute and discover that that wasn't such a great idea³, I have absolutely none for people who get angry at service employees who have done everything they can to do their jobs. So it's safe to say that even if I'd found the book, I would've lied about it just to spite Prof. Lazy Eye, who eventually threw her hands up in resignation once she concluded that we'd failed her.

There are three punchlines to this story.

1. During the course of the would-be transaction, Prof. Lazy Eye told Uncle Jesse that she'd had the book in her hand the previous day, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She didn't buy it then because she figured she'd be able to get it at BN, and she had a gift card.

2. She also told Uncle Jesse that she didn't have time to go uptown to the Met and get the book.

3. After saying this, she went to the cafe to get a cup of coffee. She was still there an hour later, according to the employee she cursed out.

So she was desperate to get the book, but not desperate enough to pay money for it, and not desperate enough to make the time to go to the Met for the copy that was almost certainly still there. And she didn't have time to go to the Met, but kicking back in the cafe for an hour wasn't a problem.

"Somebody please kill her or kill me. I don't care which," said Uncle Jesse once the whole ordeal was concluded. If only, Uncle Jesse. If only.

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¹ If you happen to be a middle-aged academic, stop reading. You are not my target audience.
² I can't imagine I have to tell you that the manager's name has been changed but I will anyway.
³ And I say this as an incorrigible procrastinator.

Posterity.

Prior to moving into spacious Girls in Skirts on Ladders headquarters, I wrote about a year's worth of rambling entries on Blogpod. Those entries were all deleted one evening in a fit of pique, but were preserved by a slightly insane friend who took it upon herself to copy and paste most of the blog into what ended up being a 130-page Word document. As I'd like to put new content on this blog but find myself lacking, on most days, either time or inclination to write new entries¹, I've decided to transfer relevant entries from that blog to this one. I will be backdating them to when they were originally posted, though, so be warned: new GiSoL content now goes back in time as well as forward. As you can see by looking to the right and noting that the archive section, handily titled "Elsewhen," now goes back several months prior to the inception of this blog, it has already begun. We are all doomed.

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¹ Translation: I am painfully, painfully lazy.