The Path of the Bookseller

Here’s a good and relevant one from Saturday’s New York Times. Writer Caitlin Kelly tells of her second job, working one day a week in a clothing store:

Sometimes I feel like Alice slipping through the looking glass, toggling between worlds. In one world, I interview C.E.O.’s, write articles for national publications and promote my nonfiction book. In the other, I clock in, sweep floors, endlessly fold sweaters and sort rows of jackets into size order. Toggling between the working class and the chattering class has taught me a lot about both: what we expect of ourselves, how others perceive us, ideas about our next professional step and how we’ll make it.

One bit particularly rang true:

The hardest part? It’s not scraping gum and food off the floor or standing for five straight hours. It’s not refolding clothing so many times the skin on my hands cracks from dehydration.

It’s some customers’ stunning sense of entitlement, even contempt, for those — i.e., us — they feel certain are their inferiors. Expecting good service is fair. Treating hourly wage workers like personal servants is not. When you wear a plastic name badge, few bother to read it.

Actually, some of the more annoying customers do read the badge. They then use the worker’s name in every sentence, in the condescending tone one might use in speaking to a particularly slow dog. Some of my coworkers at my previous store took to wearing pseudonyms on their badges.

Though, come to think of it, pleased customers do also read our badges and remember us. So it’s not entirely a bad thing.

I recall that some years ago, I swore that I would never again take a job where I had to wear a badge and punch in and out. That was a very different job, in my pre-retail life. I was programming, on a contract, at IBM.

That job was one of the worst that I have ever had. Each of us sat in a room alone, with little communication. There were occasional meetings, but more often than not, they excluded the contractors, who were treated in many ways as if we were of a lower caste.

Things came to a head when I discovered that all the members of our team were saving our programs to the same directory without any version management. This meant that we were wiping out each other’s work. When I tried to tell my bosses, they were unwilling or unable to understand that this was a problem.

Seeing my work (and, more often, the work of others) getting erased was more than I could stand. I stormed out of the building, drove to the contract agency’s office, spotted my supervisor in the conference room, and tossed my badge across the long table, where it slammed to a stop against her coffee cup.

She looked up, in only mild surprise, and asked what was wrong. When I told her, she asked me to sit down, and headed out of the conference room. When she returned, she brought her boss — and a plate of fresh chocolate chip cookies that she had just baked in the office cookies.

It’s really hard to maintain righteous anger in the presence of fresh chocolate chip cookies.

I calmed down, and talked it through with my supervisor. She agreed that the situation was bad, but didn’t think we’d make much headway at all in changing things. She got me to do the right thing, which was to stay on the job until she found a replacement for me. I did.

I still swore that I would never wear a badge again.

But now I gladly do so. Putting on the badge and the walkie earpiece at the start of the day feels rather like I’m donning my vestments. It’s like ducking into the phonebooth and emerging as Bookstore-Guy. Which, all in all, is good.

All of which is not the tangent that I intended.

Booksellers (and others), read this article. It gives us (and, I hope, others) a sense of who we are, and why we’re doing what we do, choosing to be in what might seem to be a lower class, and being happy at it.

Preoccupations – My Retail Job, Crazy as It Is, Keeps Me Sane – NYTimes.com.