Friday night at Books & Notions, I sold both Duets the DVD and Duets OST. To the same person.
Total: ~$34
God bless the economic stimulus package!
* The actual closing of an e-mail sent by my 10th grade English teacher to the Books & Notions Community Relations Manager informing the store that she was requiring her students to purchase a certain copy of the Oedipus trilogy.
Albums I have “hand sold” at Books & Notions:
Neon Bible Arcade Fire
Cease To Begin Band of Horses*
Armchair Apocrypha Andrew Bird*
Shepard’s Dog Iron and Wine (twice)
Two Way Monologue Sondre Lerche
* I have actually never listened to these myself.
I had a customer on Friday night buy three of the Post Secret books. Inside of one, he found the following written in colorful letters on a white card:
I enjoy farting in crowded stores and watching people discretely covering their noses.
I might have acted like the Hulk towards you yesterday if . . .
1. You wrote me an e-mail about Texas’s Primacaucas, and I thought the tone read like it was written by someone who has never seen the parts of my body my bathing suit covers. I hate feeling like you don’t know me.
2. You made me drive to downtown Dallas to pick up the form for my income tax return that I had to remind you I needed. The IRS does not take phone call inquiries by the way. When I arrived at the IRS building, they were out of every kind of form. I hate wasting gas.
3. You are a big box store with a management staff the size of a soccer team, and you can’t blank out my name on the Mystery Shop report that you hung in the break room for all to see. You blanked out the other employee that was included in the report. I hate inefficiency.
***
To top it off, I shut the door on my left middle finger on my way home. It’s still throbbing today, and somehow all the issues above just got worse this morning.
Setting: Books & Notions
Scenario: Two late teenage boys are shopping the Criterion Collection/Foreign Film/Music and Performing arts wall of DVDs in my music department. I go over to help.
Me: Whatcha guys looking for?
Boy #1: I need a gift for my best friend.
Me: Girl or boy?
Boy #1: Boy. He’s like my newest college friend.
Me: Oh? If it were me I wouldn’t buy that person a gift.
Boy #1: No we are really good friends, and I want to get him something unique to match his personality.
Boy #2: He’s unusual.
Me: So this is your best college buddy? What are you two going to do?
Start a website?
‘Zine?
Band?
Social networking site?
Cartoon strip?
T-shirt making company?
Boy #1: Uh, if we start anything, it will be a production company.
Me: Ah! I was so close! *I walk away*
Boy #2: How’d she know that?
The woman who played Blair on The Facts of Life, Lisa Whelchel, daughter works at my Books&Notions. Blair has become like a superstar in the world of Christian religious education recently. She lives on a golf course up the road from the Notions.
I have seen Blair once, just walking through the store while her daughter picked up her paycheck. Her son came in shopping another day looking for a copy of Wilco’s I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, which I own. This lead to a nice chit chat about music. He was extremely nice, polite, and indie rock knowledgeable.
Blair’s daughter is still in high school, but the twenty-something security guard came in looking for her one day. I asked “What do you need her for?” and he said “Oh, she was helping me with the religious books the other day. She knew a lot about them.”
My response: “That’s probably because her dad is a minister.”
From the store:
“I need The Diary of Anne Frank, but I don’t know who wrote it.”
From Books and Notions:
Love in the Time of CHolera (prounounced with the Ch)*
Tequila Mockingbird (To Kill A)
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinberg (Steinbeck)*
Yoga and Pilots DVDs (pilates)
John GriSSam (GriSHam)*
*said by Notions employees
