The Path of the Bookseller

Workers are coughing and sneezing and losing their voices right on schedule. The holidays have passed and the January bug is starting to make its rounds among the staff.

This happens every year. When I first became a bookseller, I thought that people might be taking advantage of the slightly slackened pace at work to get some time off. But no, the bug is real. And I remembered (as I continually would forget during the Eighties and a friend would consistently remind me) that I tend to get sick a few days after a major performance.

I used to get angry at myself for getting sick but, perhaps due to my contact with aficionados of Chinese medicine in my San Francisco days, have come to try to take a more relaxed view of it. It’s not that something is going wrong; rather, it’s my body doing what it does when changes of the seasons or other transitions hit. It’s sort of like a snake molting. So when I get sick, I tend to just allocate a couple of days to being a sick body, and focus on that. (Of course, it might not be so much a glimpse of enlightenment as a rationalization brought on by not having health insurance anymore.)

So it’s not surprising that workers are getting sick. This holiday season was more grueling than most: we were severely understaffed much of the time, and most of the customers crammed what would usually be a couple of months of shopping into the final week. In stress like that, many of us tend to fend off getting sick by sheer inertia and force of will, knowing that the group simply can’t afford for people to be ill. And when the holidays end, we get to let down our guard… and whammo: the January Bug appears.

We would usually have about a dozen workers, counting management, on a Sunday. Today, one bookseller and one supervisor called out sick, and a manager surrendered and went home at lunchtime. That meant that we had a single manager in charge of everything for the latter eight hours of the day. That manager is always singularly gracious, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even he were cranky by closing. And the rest of us were doing the eternal pivot: no sooner would we get back to the information desk from helping a customer than another would come at us from another direction. We never quite got completely overwhelmed by customers, but we also never got to stand still for more than about a half-minute at a time.

I hasten to mention that I’m not under the weather myself… yet. I’ll keep plowing ahead. With our engines of commerce seeming to be driven by the Infinite Improbability Drive, and with my probably self-defeating tendency to want to be everywhere on the sales floor at once, I’m keeping my inertia running. I allow myself one day a week of intentional immobility. Otherwise, I just brandish my Eveready^TM Bunny ears and keep on keepin’ on.