- "Are you affiliated with Barnes and Nobel?" Are you huffing glue? What sort of cave do you live in to think this? It must be a cave with a build up of carbon monoxide that's killing your brain cells. B&N... Christ.
- Next up a guy was making a return with a woman's name on the receipt. That's fine. Whatever. So he got a credit for buying other stuff. Well, one of the CDs he was getting was not on as great a sale as he thought so he dropped a magazine. He then started bitching about getting a $2 credit on a return card. If he got the magazine he wouldn't have had the card. I told him this but he just kept on ranting about the free money he was getting back. Classy.
- "The title is 'Known'" She proceeded to spell it. I asked if there was any more to the title. Like a good customer, she didn't know. Did she know the author? I asked and she responded by yelling, "You want to know everything, don't you?!" Maria came up and handed her The Known World. It was the right book. I was then treated to a lecture on how good a sales-woman Maria was and how I asked too many questions. Next time I simply won't ask anything at all and hand her the nearest book I can find.
- I met smelly guy for the first time. He was lurking behind the drama section when I went to pull out a Bronte novel. I've smelled him before but never this close. I realized he was there a mere 5 feet away. I instantly began developing a headache and my eyes started tearing. This is not hyperbole, this guy is amazingly rank. He has sued both a train line and a library for kicking him out based on his smell. He smells bad as a career. Later, he wandered over to the newspapers. The info desk is about 20-30 feet away. I pulled out the bottle of Axe Body Spray (put at info for this guy in particular) and had to spray. The store reeked of body spray and smelly guy for an hour but it was better than just his smell. I went back to drama and sprayed the chairs to try and cover his stench. Eye-watering stench. I think he could kill with this smell. Death itself would gag in his presence.
- "Volomay." Great way to start a conversation. She wanted a book by Volomay. When I asked her the title she shouted, yes shouted, "Volomay" a few times, louder each time. I responded by asking her the title, saying the word "title" loud and slow so she could understand it as I understood Volomay. And how did she spell Volomay, I asked. "R-O-L-L-O M-A-Y". Shout it again, bitch.
- Finally, the end of the night approached. It looked like I was in the clear. Alex and I were lounging at the register when up comes a couple. "We're looking for Captain Corelli's Mandolin." Alex and I paused, about to tell them that these were cash registers and not computers. The computers were at the info desk. As we opened our mouths the husband jumped in, very loudly, "Oh, I'm sorry! Is this the cafe?"
All this was a close second to the dread I had when I saw I was covering a certain someone's lunch in cafe. Some people have heard me complain about her before. Today I ran into Chad and described her as "Amelia Bedilia's younger sister, who has down syndrome". Honestly! We keep a journal in the cafe to keep the next shift up to date on what's going one. I wrote that when making coffee she should also put in the coffee pot stems, the bit that actually pumps the coffee out into a cup. In response, she wrote that she "has a system, but would gladly switch to mine". I wrote back that it's not a "system", but how the coffee pots work. Unbelievable. I know that it's cool to "damn the man" and buck the system and all, but she's a fucking mess. There's a system in the cafe not to oppress the baristas, but to make things easier on us. One example is to do dishes. Do we do this to piss of the dish washer? No, we do this so the next person isn't left with 8 hours worth of dishes on their shift, something which this person often does. Don't randomly move the different kinds of coffee beans to different shelves. To keep the workers down? No, so we don't brew regular and give them to people who order decaf. Instead she moves them around and we've had to dump pot after pot because we don't know what we just brewed. But at least she whines a lot. And is slow. That's got to count for something, right? Incompetence personified. I think what really gets to me is that not only is she terrible at everything she does, but she gets an attitude against fixing her mistakes. I've heard someone stay that she just enjoys being angsty about things, that she likes pissing people off and being "rebellious". I'd think that was true if I believed she actually put that much thought behind anything she does. God, she is so vexing. I bet if she left work would become easy, customers smarter and The Da Vinci Code would come out in paperback.
Next issue: my shiny new commercial grade amp and box!
