“I’m not just intolerant”
Announced a customer to me, out of the blue the other day.
I boggled. Then she decided to expand: “I’m not just gluten intolerant, I’m lactose intolerant.”
Again a boggle. I mean, why walk up to a bookseller and announce this? Next she starts wittering about the Patrick Holford clinic in London (I think I was supposed to be impressed) and how they had “diagnosed” her (quelle surprise etc.) as having food issues that they could treat for her. So she wanted a book (eventually this came out) that they had told her to buy (along with a bucketload of Holford snake oil pills). Oddly enough the book wasn’t readily available, which caused her to have a strop, which I guess proved that she is intolerant… and that what Holford says doesn’t make books sell. Thankfully.
Then today, a co-worker tells me that they had a customer the other day who had a complaint about dictionaries. It was unique in that she wanted a dictionary that contained only “hard words”. As an example she opened a dictionary to an random entry and announced “Hygiene! See I already know what that means. That’s no use to me. I need something that only has words that I don’t already know.” The bookseller boggled a bit before explaining that dictionaries contain all kinds of words, and that people who are learning english (for example) may not know the words she considered to be “too simple” for inclusion. Not good enough. Apparently the dons of Oxford should psychically produce personalized dictionaries for customers like her. And possibly label hers with her name too, and only produce one copy and arrange to have it shelved somewhere she’ll be sure to come across it. Yeah….
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, people manage to surprise you.
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