Excuse me, do you work here?
Filing this under WTF
Good morning friend,
We are ten days away from Christmas Eve and it is showing in every way at the bookstore. The store is BUSY from the moment we open the doors. I have been working eight-hour shifts and I am exhausted by the time I come home. My feet are doing well in my Hokas with the Superfeet Insoles (not an affiliate link, it’s just a great product), as I am moving for 7.25 of those hours.
Last week, people were buying games, puzzles, and stocking stuffers. This is by no means confidential information, it’s just what I’ve observed by helping customers on the floor and at the cash registers.
In the “unhinged behaviour” department, there was a doozy last week. I was walking from the back of the store toward the main aisle; my co-worker was walking in the opposite direction from the front of the store. We were both moving toward a lady at the computer kiosk to see if we could help her. Before we could get to her, she picked up the phone beside the kiosk and said, “Is someone already helping you?”
I looked at my co-worker and mouthed WTF?.
“Okay,” the lady said, “I’ll see if Alice* can help you.”
My co-worker got to her first.
“Excuse me, but do you work here?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve worked in places with this same phone system. I know that beeping means someone is on hold. Do you know if Alice is available?”
“I’m sure she is already helping,” my co-worker said. “Sometimes it takes a few minutes to finish helping someone. Please don’t pick up the phone again.”
It took me some time to recover from the shock. Who TF does that? Do I go into Staples and ring people through the register because I see the line is long? No. Because I don’t work there. Next to two women physically fighting over a sweater when I worked at Gap, this was the most bizarre thing I’d ever seen a customer do.
I guess it could have been worse. I’ve been waiting for the cranky customers to show up, which tends to happen the closer we get to Christmas and things sell out. So far, that hasn’t happened. And Universe, this is not an invitation to make that happen.
*Alice is not her real name.
Also last week, someone on threads posted about wanting to find memoirs by Canadian authors. I jumped in, answering that I had three. And then someone else commented on my comment, asking if I had written a memoir about retail.
And that was all there was to this interaction.
I don’t know either of these people, yet somehow, the algorithm delivered them to my feed. Cool. I am always up for some quiet marketing of my books.
And then, during one of shifts, one of my co-workers approaches me and asks me if I wrote Spent. She’s tells me she saw my comment on Threads and remembers meeting me when she worked at another bookstore and I came in to drop off copies of that memoir. I had a rush of a memory and I totally remember our brief conversation in that other bookstore about working in retail. Now we work together, back in the retail environment of our choosing.
I am totally happy to be back on the sales floor with zero management responsibilities. I am no longer a 30-year-old trying to climb the ladder. I am a mid-fifties social person who just wanted to get out of the house and have meaningful connections. At a time when people are losing the ability to interact with each other, I am finding ways to interrupt their scrolling and engage them in conversations they weren’t expecting to have. If I see someone carrying a bag of movie popcorn, I’ll ask if they actually saw a movie or if they just bought popcorn (every time, it’s just popcorn). I look at what people are picking off the shelves and tell them an anecdote about the author (if I have one, and I surprise myself with how many tidbits I’ve gathered about various authors). I greet everyone with a smile because I am having fun (even when I’ve passed 10,000 steps and still have two hours left in my shift).
I did not anticipate how this part-time job would positively affect my mental health. I have somewhere to be, people to see, and books to talk about, all which check my happiness boxes.
A week and a half away from Christmas, I hope my cheeriness brings others some comfort, even if we are sold out of every book they seek.
xo Dana