the calm after the storm...

Okay, my pretties, I'm back in blogging action. It's been quite the holiday season. I have now learned why my precious co-workers, in all their snobby glory, hate boxing week. Allow me to set the scene for you...

So Christmas rush was crazier than the guy on the street who yells "Can I ask you a question" to everyone who passes him, every day of the week, every week of the year (but that's another story). I learned that in that one week before Christmas, sales can be upwards of 20X that of 'normal' times of year. As you can imagine, lines were long and customers bitchy. Everyone wanted Jon Stewart's America (sold out) or the Da Vinci Code (sold out - unless you want the overpriced illustrated edition - yeah, I thought not). Anyway, long lines, bitchy customers, blah blah blah. Time flew. All of a sudden, I found myself walking into the store on boxing day - a store aglow with flourescent coloured tags that advertised 20% off all books, 50% off all calendars. The boss and his family were there in full force, adding tags to more and more and more books, often covering the title/author in the process. I asked my kind and patient co-worker why they put so many tags on the books. She said that they were in a panic about low sales, and wanted to make sure people knew there was a sale going on. Well, as I predicted, that did nothing.

"Are all your books on sale?"

"Is this book on sale?"

"Are only the tagged books on sale?"

"Are you having any kind of sale this week?"

Amid these lost and bewildered customers came a new barrage of customer queries, quandries, questions and cunundrums:

No, we don't do returns without a receipt - even if it was a gift - even if you already have it - even if the price tag is still on the back. You could have walked out the door with that book five minutes ago. (Although, a flaw in the logic of that policy is that we don't give $ returns, we're exchange or credit only, so even if they did steal the book, the value of the book is already lost, therefore if they exchange that book for another one, then the value of the loss stays the same. So what the f*** is all the fuss about.)

My favorite encounter of the past few weeks has got to be my encounter with one of my former coffee shop co-workers. This dude was kinda twitchy when I knew him a couple years ago. He was out of law school and procrastinating doing his clerking, thus procrastinating becoming a lawyer and had been at the 'bux for 5 years. Anyway, I heard that he left that place shortly after I did and actually did the lawyer thing. Good for him.

So anyway, lawyer boy comes into the store, recognizes me, we shoot the shit for a couple minutes, then he asks if I can look up a book for him. Absolutely. No Problem. What's the book?

He gives me some title, and asks about the hardcover. I tell him the price of the hardcover, tell him we can order it for him if he wants it. Then he adds:

"Nah, I don't want it. I had it, but someone stole it from me. Now I'm taking them to court and suing them for it, so I needed to know how much it was worth."

Oh dear. That's a $30-40 book. Someone went from anti-lawyer to mega-lawyer in two and a half years. Slow down, buddy. Take it easy. Maybe law school wasn't such a great idea after all.