The Path of the Bookseller

“Yup, it looks like we have several Merchant of Venices — er, Merchants of Venice — no, there are several copies, um, editions, uh — yes, we have quite a few versions of the Shakespeare here.”

Yes, it was that kind of day, all day. And it wasn’t until writing this down now, after work, that I noticed that “quite a few” is an apparently contradictory phrase that my mother tends to criticize me for using. (Sorry, Ima.)

The day kept switching gears without any middle mode or chance for us to hit a rhythm. At one moment the store would be almost empty. Then a horde of customers would come rushing in, each with a different demand. And then, just as suddenly, they would disappear. It might have been that the snow outside kept starting and stopping, or had something to do with the mall’s underground garage mysteriously remaining closed. But, except for the absence of tell-tale flashes of light at the junctures, I might have thought that we were bouncing back and forth in time.

The day started like a regular Sunday. The temperature was in the upper teens, which didn’t feel exceptionally cold outside. Indoors, however, the areas near the doors, including the checkout line, were quite cold, especially in the quiet moments when the cashiers weren’t in motion. I got to work early, as usual on a Sunday; they way that the buses are scheduled, I’m either very early or a bit late. I clocked in a bit early so that I would have time to put the Sunday papers together. We got a ton of copies of the Plain Dealer, as usual (and, as usual, one more of the comics section than of either the business or news bundles), a few copies each of the Akron Beacon Journal, the News Herald, and the New York Times. This time, we actually got four copies of the Times in rather than the usual three, which means that one customer fewer was angry when we ran out of them moments after opening.

When we get to the store before opening, we have to stand outside and ring a doorbell. then wait for a manager or supervisor to unlock the door for the moment and let us in. I was already up at the registers when a coworker got there and rang the bell. I saw her, waved, and shrugged dramatically, apologizing for not being able to let her in. I headed toward the back room to alert my manager, in case he had not heard the bell. As I was about to head in, he headed out toward the front door, apparently to let her in.

A few moments after we opened, though, he asked me if I had seen or heard from the coworker. I did a double-take. “Didn’t you let her in a few minutes ago?” I asked.

“Me? No,” he said. “I didn’t hear her.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’ve seen customers come through the door, so I thought you had unlocked it to let her in and they came in, too.”

“No,” he said slowly, then together with me, “So where is she?”

I stepped outside the door to where she had been standing, waiting, bundled in her parka. (In my shirtsleeves, it *was* cold.) She wasn’t there. I thought of heading out to the coffeeshop a few doors down in the mall, since that’s where I would have gone to hang out if the door wasn’t opened, but one of those flurries of customers showed up, mostly for newspapers, and I got stuck at the registers.

She showed up a few minutes later. She had indeed come into the mall, hit the ladies’ room downstairs, then waiting for the store’s doors that open into the mall to open. She was still shivering when she got to the registers. Our manager graciously declared over the headsets that each of us would get a free hot cocoa, and actually made them and brought them to us at our stations.

(The doors to the store are a source of continuing confusion. We call them the “outside doors” and “mall doors.” Customers call them the front doors and back doors, but don’t do so consistently. When customers ask about something or describe something as being near the front doors, we have to ascertain carefully which doors they mean. And legend has it that the main entrance to the store was once through yet another set of doors out onto the second story landing, which are now alarmed and to be used only in emergencies. And, since the mall is built into a hill, the second story landing on that side of the building, looking over the street, is on the same level as the ground floor entrance from the parking lot. This causes yet another confusion of “front” and “back”, as well as whether we’re on the ground or top floor, makes describing the position of the store and things within it even more confusing. I’ve given up on trying to tell people where things are. Unless I’m tethered to a phone, I just take them where they need to go.)

The other highpoints (or were they lowpoints? The whateverpoints) of the day:

A customer came in looking for what she called “Melissa and Doug puzzles,” saying that another of our nearby stores had them in the kids section. I went with her to look.

Now, there are people who understand the kids section, and for whom its organization makes immediate sense. I am not among them. When I go in there, it feels like an attack of Bozeman’s simplex, what with all the displays, shelves set at skewed angels, spinner racks, bins of plush toys, and things that burp, wheedle, and squawk when you bump into them. (And that’s not to mention the actual kids, who have a remarkable affinity for running face first into grownups’ knees.)

But I gamely went in and looked at the puzzle books and boxes. Nothing seemed to be by anyone named Melissa or Doug. I entered “melissa doug” into our search system, and came up with a single item, which we didn’t have. I stepped over to customer, and told her, in the culturally appropriate tones of mournful self-abasement, that we were out of Melissa and Doug items.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” she said gleefully.

“I looked it up, and unfortunately, it seems that–”

She waved a hand in my face, then pointed: “Look!”

I looked up. And behold, there was an entire wall of stuff, with shelves below it, with a round red “Melissa and Dave” logo. And the computer knew of none of them. “O–kay,” I said. “So we do. Thanks. I’ll know this now.”

She bounded out with an armful of the toys. I stared at the wall to memorize their position. But, the kids department being what it is, I have little doubt that overnight, the elves of mercantile indeterminacy will have hidden them again behind the Shifting Sands where no mere mortal will find them.

The other moment? A call just before I left. The customer was bellowing into a cell phone with spotty but sufficient reception. “Youwill find a book for me. I have the S-I-T-N number.”

I was able to sort out that he probably meant the ISBN number. But when I asked him for it, what he said wasn’t anywhere near any form of ISBN that I had ever seen.

“Well, I’m not seeing it, but do you have the title or author?”

He had both. It was, as I expected, one of those books on The Secrets Of How To Get Rich By Sitting Around and Thinking About It. (Second guess would have been a sex book.) We had it.

“Right!” he yelled into his phone. “Now you’re gonna save it for me. My name is D-O-G, you got that, D-O-G, yeah, then G, E, you got that, yeah, like the light bulb company, G-E, then T and T, that’s two T’s, T and T, you got that, and I’m the Third! The Third! Yeah, the Third! I’ll be there!” And he hung up. (And, of course, his name wasn’t really Doggett, but something with a similar structure. All names have been changed to protect, um, me.)

And that ended that part of the day. Then I zoomed out to hit a coffeeshop, get online, then meet folks to go to a rehearsal an hour away for an opera project that I’m co-writing. And then home after midnight. It’s 2 AM and I’m just posting this now. And I wake up at 7 AM for another day’s work. *thud*