Category Archives: So You Want To Work In A Bookstore
Everyone is always so excited to apply for a job at a bookstore. For the most part, they have a real love and respect for books. But they think you get to hang out and read books all day. The truth of it is, working in a bookstore is less about the books now and more about people and they’re not always the well-read, literature loving folk you’d expect. These are the people you’re going to meet if you want to work in a bookstore.
So You Want to Work in a Bookstore: Lesson 7 | Sweatpants Guy
No longer resigned to lounging on the couch on Sundays for every football game ever, no longer for painting or yardwork or staring at that weight bench in your basement you keep intending to use. What? No, you will, I know. Next week. You’ll start your workout routine next week.
No! No sir, not anymore are sweatpants marginalized and cast aside in favor of pants with their fancy zippers and buttons and measured waists. Who the hell do those pants think they are? No more!
Sweatpants. Sweatpants are your going out pants now, because somewhere along the line we have devolved into a society where this is entirely acceptable. With sweatpants you get a a full range of motion, the possibility of keeping one pair your entire life no matter how fat you end up with their revolutionary stretchable elastic waistband; and, of course, the liberating knowledge that your balls are just bouncing free as you walk, unhindered by stiff, restrictive fabric that other “pants” fall victim to. The ladies will love that last bit. A man in sweatpants is DTF, you better believe that. And for the record, real men wear their sweatpants pulled up an inch above their ankles to properly show off the white socks they’re wearing with sandles.
I was kneeling down, putting some books away on the bottom shelf when a husky, sweatpants clad customer who had a five-o’clock shadow on only half his face, stopped at the end of the aisle.
When I looked up he gave me a big, wide-eyed smile and snapped the waistband of his sweatpants.
“Yes sir!” he yelled and nodded at me, his eyebrows threatening to jump off his face, and continued on his way.
“Ok,” I said to the now empty space he had occupied (well, what else do you say?) and went back to what I’d been doing.
Until he came back. He always come back, that’s an important point to remember. You spoke while facing his general direction and that means you spoke to him. That means, as far as Sweatpants Guy is concerned, you are the only person in the store. You made the mistake of acknowledging his existence, something that apparently no one else has done in quite some time.
See, you’re the guy in the horror movie that opened the creepy nailed-shut door behind a shelf in his basement his first night in the new house that he bought for a surprisingly low price that the rest of the town avoids going near. How many red flags do you need? The house was wearing sweatpants, why did you even look at it? Now you’re the guy that lets out the evil spirit that’s been trapped in there since the house was built over an old Indian burial ground. Now, you gotta pay the piper, because that evil sweatpants-wearing spirit will now feast on what is left of your retail soul.
Anything else Sweatpants Guy needs to ask, that he needs to say, any other thought regarding his favorite snack foods or his opinion of the color green, anything at all that pops into his lumpy noggin that he inexplicably needs to speak aloud, he will find you, and he will tell you. And only you. Because you’re friends now.
Sweatpants Guy popped back around the corner of the aisle about 27-seconds later—-he didn’t come back into the aisle, make no mistake about that—-he only leaned around the corner. And waited. I saw him out of the corner of my eye and took a deep breath. I’d been through this before. There’s no point in trying to avoid it or pretend he isn’t there. Sweatpants Guy has nowhere else to be. He can do this all night. He stared at me silently until I looked up.
“Do you still have—-you have paper applications, or I do it online now?”
“Online.”
“Excellent!” he yelled, and pumped his fist int he air, and with a sweatpanty swish and a cloud of the cheap potpourri he rubbed on himself before leaving the house to mask that man-stink of indeterminate origins, he disappeared again, leaving me with the realization that he would probably get hired and I would be the one to argue with him that sweatpants were not acceptable work attire.
A Too-Late List for Mr. Poetic Fiction
“Maybe you can help me,” my co-worker said after she waved me over, “That customer over there is looking for ‘poetically written contemporary fiction.’ Everything I’ve suggested he’s pooh-poohed already.”
I made a face. I made a face like I… well, like I had to pooh-pooh a little. What does that even mean? Poetically written contemporary fiction?
First of all, the definition of contemporary depends on the person. You might think contemporary and modern are synonymous. Sounds like it. Maybe. Nope. I made that mistake when I took a class once called “Modern Philosophy.” That branch of philosophical namby-pambying starts in the 17th century. In a big picture kind of way sure, that’s modern times, but not for a 19 years old college kid. Contemporary philosophy, while closer to the mark, is still old. It picks up towards the end of the 19th century.
The periods in literature are more confusing and more poorly defined because writers are artists, which means we’re all babies and can’t make up our minds about anything. Periods overlap and lack any clear start or end. Contemporary literature, I guess, starts in the 1930s, because that’s what Wikipedia said. More or less.
But is that what this guy meant by contemporary? Your typical bookstore browser might say contemporary but mean current, present-day. Does he want new releases? How new? And what does he really mean by ‘poetically written’? I can jot down some sentence fragments full of adjectives and no clear point, if that’s what he wants. Better yet, I’ll write a full page and just delete every third word, let’s call that poetry. I think someone may have written a poem on the wall in the men’s room, how’s that for contemporary?
I offered up Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Before I could complete my dramatic exit however, I suddenly thought of a book I’d read a few years ago, one I came across by chance walking down an aisle in the Fiction section. It was depressing, full of imagry and difficult to follow; if that isn’t the purest definition of poetry then—well, actually I think I’ve made it clear I have no understanding of poetry. After handing this book off to my coworker a couple others came to mind, and for no particular reason, I’m going to share them with you. I’ll start with the one the guy purchased…
Tinkers 
/ Paul Harding
—
It was weird. It left me feeling as though I was looking up while being sucked down into a whirlpool. It’s been a couple years since I read it, so that could actually be something that happened in the book, I’m not sure. That’s the only way I can describe my memory of reading it. It centers on an man lying in a hospital bed in his dining room dying. In and out of consciousness, the world around him constantly breaks down as he moves through his memories and those of his father. What’s real, what is hallucination, what is the point of… all of it?
The cover of the paperback is absolutely appropriate: a snow-covered field, a solitary figure. Imagine being that—no, imagine being in that field and seeing that figure. Walking across the field in the snow, the cold reaching through your coat and the fog of your breath pouring out of you, but never getting any closer to that figure, and that figure never turning around to see you.
the Solitude of Prime Numbers
/ Paolo Giordano —
A few years ago, when this book first came into the store, a coworker and I instantly hated the author. Italian, good looking, twenty-seven and working on a doctorate in particle physics who, you know, in his spare time, wrote a novel. He’s probably one of those guys who makes riding a scooter look badass. His author photo only rubs it in that I don’t have an awesome corduroy sport coat. Yet.
The book makes you uncomfortable. There’s no point in trying to hide that from you. You care about the characters, you want things to happen, but you’re entirely sure if they deserve to be happy. You want them to be, you want things to work out. But you also give up and push them away. You’re rooting for and against them the entire time. It’s painful and beautiful in the same moment. Its infuriating. Paulo, you need to stop being awesome.
the End of the Alphabet
/ C.S. Richardson —
I saw this book on the shelf but forgot the title and the author. Three years later I finally tracked it down after countless internet searches with the incredibly limited information I had. This book is beautiful, inside and out; it is a tragedy of literature that it is out of print. OK, that might be a slight exaggeration, but the book broke my heart. Go find a used copy of it, buy it, it’s worth it. Be dramatic and read it on the porch during an afternoon rainstorm. Have either a glass of bourbon or a cup of tea within reach. It’s a short book. You can read it in one sitting, but it will be a book that on days when you are feeling alone or lost, when nothing can hold your attention, you will want to find it on your shelf and read again.
The main character, Ambrose Zephyr is going to die. He has one month, so he and his wife pack their bags to travel the world in alphabetical order. This is about loss, it’s about dreams, about love. It’s the shortest book ever written to cover everything that makes a life beautiful.
Why Reinhold Glière Owes Me Gas Money
“Is there a discount on that for wasting my time?” is what I expected George to say. While he wasn’t doing heel clicks and high fiving people the second time around, he also wasn’t looking for a fight, and that was an improvement. I’ve decided that George (not his real name) and I have something in common; he always expects the worst in a situation. The problem with that outlook is that a great deal of the time, you bring on that outcome. I expect the worst, but more in order to be pleasantly surprised. George on the other hand, expects it and brings that result on by being something of a cranky bastard.
“Why did you shake that customer’s hand when you saw him?” my coworker asked after George had left happy. Or George-happy at least, which meant he’d said thank you and didn’t look like he was going to punch me in the face.
“I helped him yesterday, I was taking care of something for him.”
“Yeah, but why did you shake his hand?”
At first I shrugged and laughed it off, “I went to private school, we shake everyone’s hand when we see them.” Which is true, by the way. Picking out private school boys is easy; the year after they graduate, they’re the guys with terrible facial hair, the patchy, awful beards grown because they finally wouldn’t get detention for having whiskers, ten years out you can still pick the private school boys out of crowd by their khakis and blue blazers (and 
The truth is, it was partially the knee-jerk reaction of the, “Good to see you” handshake when meeting a familiar face even while thinking, “Who is this guy?” But ultimately, I’d made the decision the day before that should I see George again I’d shake his hand, call him Mr——, and take him up to the register to ring him up. It’s the same principle as when a customer stops you to ask a question. Whatever you’re doing you stop, you put down your stack of books, and you give them your undivided attention.
In high school, I had a crew coach who made us do sets of eleven when it came to push-ups, leg lifts or the other countless physical hells brought down by the wrath of a Jesuit priest who would follow us in his battered Chevy Corsica on our runs to shout… encouragement. The idea behind it was to train us for the sprint at the end of a race, to condition us to push for one more even when we thought we were done. If you can do eleven then why not push for fifteen, and if you’re at fifteen then twenty is within reach.
Before crew, I had a Tae Kwon Do instructor who would line us up against the wall during our Saturday morning class, tell us to plant our foot and do ten side-kicks while he yelled out the count. With each kick we would yell, a vocal manifestation of the energy behind the side-kick. He would walk the line, adjusting our stance, reminding us to keep our arm up, holding his hand high above our head to aim our kick at. When we reached ten he would yell, “One more! One more! One more!” The ‘one more’ would usually surpass the initial count, the exercise becoming a competition to see whether our legs or his voice would give out first. These two coaches, in vastly different sports, understood not only how to train us to set goals, but also to never be satisfied simply by achieving them. They wanted us to fight to blow those goals away, to be prepared physically and mentally for the sprint, to always be ready for one more. It was to prepare us to take that next step when anyone else would have said they’d gone far enough.
The problem stemmed from my store carrying two recordings of this symphony, one featuring Falletta and the BPO and one by somebody else. The one by somebody else was put on hold for George when he called. And the one by the BPO? That one, the only copy we had, sold about an hour before he came into the store. That’s how I ended up on the receiving end of George’s rant involving how much money he spends in the store (I don’t care), how rude he found our music staff (no they’re not, and also, pot calling the kettle black?), and how he’d driven all the way to the store the day after a blizzard (so you drove here on a nice day).
“Now I want to know what can you do for me,” he finished.
I was a bit lost for words. He’d thrown a lot at me. What can I do for him? Usually, the customer asking that is holding out their hands so we can throw money or free items into them until they finally love us again. Nothing makes me feel less inclined to help a person then having them berate me and then expect to be rewarded for having done so. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, that’s how the situation is resolved, if not by me then one of my bosses who then berates me as well for not throwing a gift card at the customer myself. Money isn’t the answer, or at least it shouldn’t be our answer. A gift card doesn’t solve the problem, it pushes the problem down the line to someone else because now that customer knows were giving away free money every time they raise their voice.
“Not much,” he scoffed.
I agreed. There really wasn’t much I could do, and certainly nothing at all that would put that CD in his hand at that very moment. Underneath it all was realizing that it was our mistake–an honest mistake, I will stick by that, but our mistake nonetheless, and I wanted to make right even if George was a jerk. I called our only other store to have a copy of it, one about twenty miles away. After triple checking the product number, conductor and album name (loudly so that George could hear) I asked them to put it on hold under my name. I told him that I drive out to the other store and pick up the CD, but wouldn’t be able to get there until later that evening; I would call him when I was back at this store with the item on hold for him. He didn’t seem as though he believed me. He didn’t say thank you.
Round-trip from my house to the three stores and back is about forty miles. I spent most of it considering whether this was even worth it. Should I have just told him he was out of luck and let him yell at me a little more? What did it matter? His behavior certainly didn’t deserve the time I was taking out of my day to do this.
They were sweet and understanding, and I ended up going to two different stores in order to get the books shipped out by the next day. In that case I didn’t have a problem doing it, they just as concerned that I didn’t beat myself up over it as they were about the books themselves. At least they knew what happened to their son’s package and we could get everything straightened out. Most people aren’t as patient Mr. & Mrs. Wuhr. They didn’t want anything other than to know we could take care of it. I’d forgotten about that couple until after I’d picked up the CD. For that memory alone I’m glad I did this. It’s important to hold onto any bit of kindness you encounter. Some days they’re all you’ll have.
“What can you do for me,” he’d asked.
Not much. And initially, there wasn’t much I wanted to do. I was tired, my day was almost over. I didn’t have the energy or the patience for this garbage. He was a jerk. And that’s when it’s important to smile, when you have to smile. You have to take a deep breath and push yourself to eleven, and then to fifteen, to twenty. You have to find a way to go the extra mile, or go ‘above and beyond’ as we call it at the store. One more. There wasn’t much I could do. One more. I could do this much. One more.
I expected the worst when he came back. A demand for a discount or repeating his complaints from the day before. Instead, he remembered my name. He spotted me first and called out my name. His face was still blank, but his voice was softer this time around. So I set down the books I was putting away and went over to him. I smiled and shook his hand. I told him it was good to see him and that I’d checked on his CD as soon as I came in that morning to make sure it was right where I’d left it. I rang him up for ‘Il’ya Muromets’ and a few magazines he also had, and told him to ask for me if there was anything else he was looking for. George said thank you this time, and that he appreciated how quickly I was able to get it for him. He still didn’t smile though. Next time, next time he’ll smile. Unless he’s a robot that requires the sweet symphonic stylings of the BPO to recharge at night….
Gas Station Burrito 