How can we sell books we don’t know we have?

Remember the dubious genii of booksellers, nicebutdimus and cantbearsedus? They struck again last week.

We order from a number of suppliers for customer orders, and everyone is warned on pain of severe pain not to open anything from any of these, but to pass the package on to me or another senior bookseller for processing.

Note the “Everyone” in the above sentence. Also note there is never a day when either of us is not there.

Why then do I stumble across books I’ve ordered for myself, on the shelf, unpriced, with no invoice and nothing on the system to say that they’ve arrived? This prompts a major panic on my part. How many other packages has this genius opened? Are customer orders sitting out on the floor? Eeek! My head started to explode.

And…not only were books from other order batches out on the shop floor, unpriced, but some of them even had invoices tucked in to them.  On. The. Shelf.

Why log and price up a delivery when you can just shelve it? Are the customers who buy these books supposed to log the invoices for their lazy asses???
And how pray would they do that???

Argh! Much anger and stewing ensued, as well as a chunk of re-ordering to save blushes when customers come looking for stock that has been “accidentally” sold.

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!