Ahem...
Firstly, next time I go back to work where I'm on my feet for 6 hours at a stretch bending up and down, and next time I do a quilt, necessitating lots of standing around for pinning and pressing, and next time I start working out again With A Vengeance... Someone PLEASE remind me not to do all three things at once!! My feet and knees are about to go on strike. Seriously.
The money's a good thing at least and I'm to the point now where I only want to strangle a coworker about once a week and feel pretty comfy at last with most of my job so I can just go in and get stuff done and not feel like such a fish out of water. So there.
On the downside crazy customer questions exist everywhere. Those "overheard in bookstore" things really do happen. Witness the lady at the Book Stop who really did call in asking for a book to be put on hold that she had been perusing earlier that day, "It was in the literature aisle and it was blue." Along the same lines...
During last Monday's shift, this kid (OK fine he was probably 25) comes to me and says "I'm looking for a book on phenomenon." Never mind the plural/singular lesson, I decided to go straight to the heart of the issue.
--"Um well... what kind of phenomena?"
--"You know... phenomenon."
--"Do you mean supernatural?" (Pointless probably to tell him that pretty much anything in the entire universe could be summed up as some type of phenomenon.)
--"Well, I don't know... I just want to read about phenomenon."
This went on for a couple of minutes but even when I used specific examples "You mean like UFO's and such?" or asked him outright for an example of his own he resisted saying yes or no and just kept using the word "phenomenon" over and over in his answer no matter what, like that narrowed it down quite enough. Honestly we're talking about 6-7 conversation interchanges. I finally decided he had learned a new word and had made a pact with himself to use it in every sentence for 3 days til he felt like he had mastered it...
So! I took him to New Age. He was dubious at first but I pointed out the entire shelf there conveniently labeled "Phenomena." He couldn't exactly argue with that! Altho of course he tried to. I finally just nicely but matter-of-factly said that without more info this was the best I could do. "I think you're in the right place. Take a look here for a little while and see what you find and then come get me if you don't have any luck."
This is one of those times where early middle age comes in handy. When you take on a certain tone with youngsters in their 20's they just kind of accept your authority as a done deal. That could be a southern thing, too, tho, partly.
Wednesday... (Working title: When a Little Knowledge is a Bad Thing)
--"Do you have any books on literature?"
--"You mean literary criticism?"
-- Exasperated huff."No, I mean like novels."
(OK so it wasn't on literature but literature itself. Sigh. And btw thanks for using that tone that made ME into the idiot instead of you.)
--"Right over here. Were you looking for a particular author?"
--"Um... well I need The Republic."
--"OK," nicely even tho I wanted to be snotty, "Well Plato is actually not in literature but in philosophy," taking her over there.
I take The Republic off the shelf and hand it to her and she says (IswearI'mnotmakingthisup), "Do you have any Oedipus stories?"
--"You mean versions of Oedipus or stories with oedipal themes?"
--"Um, stories like Oedipus, I guess"
--"Well, no, I mean I think oedipal themes crop up in lots of stuff but I don't know off the top of my head anything I could just list for you. You might want to visit a literary criticism website or something to get some specific titles or authors." I guess I could have grabbed her a Hamlet to start off but despite years of osmosis clock-watching thru lit. crit. classes I admit I couldn't think of any others. It's probably a good thing anyway because if I had some bibliography of oedipal fiction in my head I'd still be there handing her tomes all over the store.
Sigh.
Despite all this I must say that one thing I'm noticing is that customers here are about 400 times nicer than they were in Beachwood. Truly. I mean we knew we had bitchy customers there but here I catch myself starting to apologize for something that we can't get or whatever in a way I would have in B'wood where we bent over backwards to head off the bitching before it could come to a boil, so confident we were of the inevitable lambasting for the tiniest thing by those self-important East Cleveland customers. I get out the explanation or the apology here and look up kind of cringing for the onslaught and 95% of the time the customer here goes: "Oh that's OK, I understand, I'll order it, no problem, I'll try next time, etc."
Knock me over with a feather. Go ahead.
:)
ps. Oh yeah - this year's winner for Second Most Disgusting Thing in a Bookstore (after the tick-infested box of mysteries someone brought us for sale at the Book Stop that one time) was a week or so ago: Poo on the floor over by the kids section. Um... we're fervently hoping that it belonged to our manager's dog, who comes in the store on occasion. Oh and YES, darn tootin' that comes in second to ticks! Poo is pretty oogey but at least you deal with it and it's dealt with instead of the entire staff fidgeting the rest of the day and having to check their heads, ears and other Tick Locales when they got home that night... There was that box that had a scorpion in it, too, I just remembered...
pps really am outta here now.
salut
4 commentaires:
At IW sometimes we would get a lot of this scenerio (always 10 minutes before we close)
Person:"My son has to do a science fair project".
me:"okay, what is he interested in?"
P:"(fill in typical boy stuff here)"
m:"okay well we have this book and this book"
p:"no, no, we need to know how to do a project".
m: " oh we sold out of those about two weeks ago, I can order..."
p:(said in angry voice)"nonono we can't wait for that, we tried all the other bookstores tonight and we thought YOU'd have something - it is due tomorrow!"
oh and I will try and call you tonight - it has been crazytown here - H had a job interview and (long story here) it was a mess.
these dialogs are priceless. i used to have them, too, but somehow they fall out of my head (no humor have i these days).
you have a great knack for capturing the problem with most people's rhetoric: they don't know what the heck they are literally saying most of the time; they don't know how to phrase a question to gain the information they want; they don't take kindly to questions seeking specifics.
just think how "news" people get stories. it's all a mess of memory and emotion. i ask the simplest thing, "when it it happen," and never get a time indicator, single-word response i need to even understand "why this is a problem then," usually a long phrase that starts, "welllllll. . . . ." and is followed by a long narrative in which no time indicators are used and it becomes impossible for me to tell what the order of events even was.
People are indeed crazy and even tho I completely sympathize with procrastination I reserve the right to be eye-rolly when those last-minute-project people come in.
Tracy I can't imagine how you deal with the query problem when it's a much bigger part of your job, altho you're probably much better at it than I am anyway. Even tho depending on the customer I can be quite gifted at times (there was a very attractive guy last night asking about some stuff and I admit to being much more imaginative and patient with my questioning than usual in that case!) :)
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