I started reading books way beyond my age level when I was 4 years old, so I’ve had a nearly lifelong love-hate relationship with them. My mom says I started reading sixth-grade science books because I watched “Sesame Street” three times a day and picked up all the phonics in them.
Other kids thought I was weird, I wound up getting glasses at an insanely early age because I strained them from sneaking books under my covers with a flashlight, and I eventually got more hooked on writing my own stories than reading those of others. So that’s why it was kind of ironic that when I was desperate five years ago and really needed a job, I got hired by a giant Barnes & Noble store.
You might think that if you’re gonna work retail, a bookstore would be a pretty cool dignified place to do it. After all, you’re not constantly having to tell people they’re not fat in clothing stores, or insisting they Supersize their fries. Instead, you’re opening their eyes and minds to great literature – or so you’d think.
Probably because I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds and hard to miss in a lineup, my managers forced me to work as the Information Guy for the store. At my branch, the manager took it way too literally and had me really wear signs around my neck saying shit like “Information,” or “How Can I Help You?” What I really should have worn was a sign saying “Down the aisle and to the left,” because that’s where the bathrooms were and because we were the only place in Old Pasadena’s shopping district dumb enough to have public bathrooms, I had to repeat that phrase about 500 times a day. I got so used to doing it that the moment someone made that “uncomfortable” or “embarrassed” face people always use when seeking a bathroom, I’d just save them the hot air from their mouths, point and say “Down and to the left.”
What was more annoying is when these same people returned from the bathroom with a horrified look on their faces, asking if there was going to be any “janitorial services rendered” on the premises anytime soon. Look, you want 5000 people to be able to use the bathroom, you’re gonna get a mess – and my job title ain’t janitor. I fantasized about losing it and spewing those very same words to someone, but never got the chance. And though I led an employee-wide push to seal off the toilets from the public, the bosses refused – until they put up the Berlin Wall of Bathrooms two weeks after I left.
Instead, I came to hate people so much through that job that I played other tricks on them. Like if I knew I was about to leave for the night or had a break coming up, and there was no way anyone could have a chance to complain about me, I’d tell them the bathrooms were in the back part of the store and up the staircase. We had a single-story store, but that didn’t stop about 18 people a day from looking for the spiral steps to Bathroomland.
I also liked to wear other employee’s name tags for an hour or two per shift and give the surliest customer service imaginable, so that they’d get yelled at or have a report written up and not even know what hit them.
My favorite questions came from people who clearly didn’t know what they were looking for: people looking for “The Adventures of Don Quixote” came up as a frequent request from people who just couldn’t’ find it – because they were looking in the biography section. Yeah, for a story about an old man who fights windmills while riding a horse around the country – find his true-life autobiography. Parents who didn’t know they just bought the sluttiest teen fiction imaginable for their daughters were also fun to serve. But my favorite was an old lady in her 80s who came in on multiple occasions seeking my advice on which book about S&M or bondage was the best one to buy. Come on! I thought grandmas are supposed to spank you, not GET spanked!! My co-workers would just stand and laugh, saying that I was the only info guy – unless a hot girl walked in with a question, of course.
In fact, it was the fact that I wanted to kill customers – fantasizing about the funniest ways to perform a massacre – that drove me to quit the store. But before I got to that point, I encountered the truly crazy people in the store – whom we called “The Regulars” yet were anything BUT regular people. It was as if our store had been taken over by Skid Row as an additional day shelter for the homeless. Some of the grossest people in LA – make that ANYwhere – thought nothing of blocking our customers by lying in the aisles and conducting their personal hygiene rituals – which were time-consuming yet, judging by the results, extremely limited at BEST – in our bathrooms. One guy had the gracious timing to have a heroin overdose on the toilet during a Christmas season rush hour, yelling out as he was pushed out on a stretcher that he had hepatitis, causing everyone in sight to run for the doors.
You might ask, Where was security in this store? Well, we didn’t have even hidden security cameras like EVRY OTHER STORE ON THE PLANET because our managers said customer surveys showed they made people “uncomfortable.” Meanwhile, we lost 8 percent of our inventory each year – 1000s of books! – to theft and then were asked why it was happening.
My final straw with the world of retail books came when one of the regulars talked me into letting him stay on my couch because he was between homes. He seemed decent and cleancut, just a regular guy with some hard luck. He didn’t fully explain that he was between HALFWAY homes for his coke addiction, and waited until the fourth night on my couch he decided to tell me the story of how he did some time in prison for the time he accidentally killed a man. I realized this was his my way of telling me I’d better not EVER ask him to leave. But thankfully, I convinced someone to MOVE IN three days later and Mr. Regular was on his way out of my apartment.
On then rare occasions I set foot in that Barnes & Noble again, my former co-workers ask why I don’t drop by and visit more often. To which I say, do you think to o many Guantanamo Bay prisoners are gonna visit again for the sun and the ocean view? It’s against human nature to go anywhere NEAR where you’ve been traumatized.
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