People are strange…

Two brief incidents worth mentioning.

The first concerns a staff-member who encountered a shall-we-say “over-enthusiastic” customer who acted out a pantomime about being unsure her camera worked, before taking a series of photos of said staff-member (poor Ruth) and then running over to her with a bar of chocolate (improbably called “Delight”) and presenting her with it because she “is such a delight”. Ruth, blinded by the flash, and generally discombobulated (well, wouldn’t you be?) spent a while wondering if the chocolate was poisoned before consigning it to the bin. We like people who are nice to us, but there is a line….

The second concerned a rather cranky lady who was looking for some quiz books. Every suggestion I made seemed to irritate her even more (frankly, she wasn’t even listening to me, a fact which will soon become apparent), she stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at me and demanding I procure her a quiz book “you know, for kids” (I kid you not, I kept seeing Tim Robbins in “the Hudsucker Proxy” and thinking about hula-hoops), over and over again, “you know, for kids”. Yes, I indeed got the gist the first time. We went into the kids section and I pulled out a few kids quiz books, none of which met with her approval as it transpired she wanted a quiz book not you know for kids, but you know for the whole family.
Oh, riiiight. “Well, we have a promotion on games and puzzles at the moment…” I begin (intending to finish off with “…including quiz books of many types, perhaps I could show you those?”) but she cut me off with a near hysterical “Idon’twantgamesandpuzzlesIwantquizbooks! QuizzesareNOTgames!” They’re not?

Well, she seemed to take even the procuring of a quiz-book inordinately seriously, so I wasn’t about to argue the semantics with her and instead brought her over to the display where there were several pub quiz books and (eureka!) a nice big fat Family Quiz book. I handed her the family quiz book, which she ignored in favour of railing against the pub quiz books for 5 minutes while I stood there practicing my deep breathing and nodding sympathetically. (At this point I was wondering if she somehow thought pub quizzes were nothing but questions about pubs, and booze and sundry other things she might feel would warp impressionable young minds….). Then she spotted a Sports quiz book and gave out about it for a minute, and eventually looked at the book she was holding, flicked through it (I wasn’t kidding when I said it was big and fat, it’s a door-stop of a thing, more questions that a family of fifteen would need to get them through a whole winter of fireside quizzes)….

Guess what? It wasn’t what she wanted either. Apparently she didn’t want one big book, she wanted a series of small books….I did suggest one book of kid’s quiz questions, one of sports and a pub quiz book for general knowledge, music, film etc. but that was not good enough either. And she didn’t want to order anything in as this was a family-quiz-book-purchasing-emergency and she needed the series of small quiz books RIGHT NOW!

*sigh*

Whoops, do you work here too?

Now it wouldn’t be fair to say that the bookseller is never wrong. We can be. Some of us often are. There are among us the genus nice-but-dimus and the genus couldn’t-be arsedus. One such is the co-worker who called me at home on my day off to tell me that a book I had ordered had come in to the shop. 1. We never bother calling staff about orders, we are all such anal-retentives that we watch like hawks for books we’ve ordered ourselves. 2. I recognised his voice straight away and addressed him by name, it didn’t put him off stride. 3. Only when I told him who I was did he get flustered and claim he didn’t recognise my surname. We’ve worked together for eight months. Never mind the surname, what about the voice??? For shame lad, for shame!

Top 5 Silly Questions

1. Do I have to go upstairs to take the lift? (Yes, it only goes down. Then we stack books underneath it til it reaches the first floor and yank ‘em all out whenever someone wants to come down in it.)

2. I don’t understand what you mean about it being out of print. Can’t they just print me off another one? I’ll pay extra. (Er, not yet sir. Soon, maybe, but not yet. Try abebooks for a secondhand copy. Have you heard of the internet?)

3. Out of print, eh? Must be very popular then, if they’ve run out? (Er, no-one has wanted to read it since 1964.)

4. Do you have the book they were talking about on the radio yesterday morning? (Title? Author? Subject? Radio show? Radio channel? Throw me a frickin’ bone????)

5. Who’s winning in the tennis? (What are we, the World Service?)

Do you have the book I’m looking for?

It’s cream, and written by a woman…I think. I’m not sure.

Argh!

Welcome to my world.