Bumping this up from a comment to a post….

This from Jabberwockys has been bumped from a comment to a post because of its sheer wonderfulness:
A little literary faux-pas story featuring myself and another bookseller, who I shall refer to as Ms. X, to spare her blushes…
Ms X: (carrying armfuls of ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ by Jean-Dominique Bauby) I tried reading this years ago, you know.
Me: Really? I read it a few years ago too and quite enjoyed it.
Ms X: He was very gloomy though, wasn’t he?
Me: (stunned)…
Ms X: I mean, what was his problem? Why was he so grumpy?
Me: Well, he had just been entirely paralysed in an accident, so he could only flicker his left eyelid.
Ms X: Eh?
Me: Yes, that’s how he wrote this whole slim volume, by blinking his left eyelid. Perhaps, as he was otherwise completely paralysed, it was understandable that he was a bit down???
Ms X: (laughing) I just thought he was being very French!!!

Is there something going on with her?

Or, busy store and lack of sleep do strange things to book-manager’s brain.

Customer strolls in looking for something, anything by Doris Lessing. Our books manager is on the till and so proceeds to look her up on the system. I ordered in 5 copies of all Lessing’s top sellers a while back, but they’ve sold out and haven’t been reordered (hello? fiction peeps?). Books manager is most puzzled by the level of sales and turns to me saying “Is there something going on with Doris Lessing? She’s all sold out.”

Me and customer (in unison) “Eh, she won the nobel prize? For literature?”

Books manager “Oh. D’oh.”

Worst thing is, she did know – coz she answered that question correctly on a quiz we were messing with in the break room last week.

It’s just the way they catch you sometimes.

Thankfully our books manager has a sense of humour, so she slagged herself off as much as we did.

Oh, and I promised not to put her name on this post. That may have helped.