One of the hot sellers at the store is mood rings, which change color according to your mood or body temperature. Kids like them a lot, and adults who were kids in the seventies get all nostalgic and weepy when they see the rings.
Because our landlord figures it's more cost effective to cool the place when it's cold outside and to heat it in the middle of summer, the air conditioning was going full blast yesterday because it was 37 degrees with winds gusting to 40 mph. Becky came into the office with the tray of mood rings and said, "Call the landlord. It's so cold in here that all the mood rings are black."
Black: stressed, tense, harried, freezing your ears off.
The day was slow but steady. When I left for a while at 2:00, about a dozen guys on vintage Indian motorcycles were in the parking lot. Although they looked gnarly on their bikes, I bet they were all accountants and insurance actuaries. I wish I had asked them to line up nicely for a picture.
I went back in at 6:00 to help Perry. A woman and her two children came in shortly after I arrived. The two girls were about 8 and 10 years old, and they and their mother were grubby in a long-standing, sticky way. The mother seemed vague and abstracted as she wandered around. The girls, on the other hand, were having a good old time in the toy section, where they examined everything and commented loudly on all the products. The older girl asked if we had a public bathroom, and I said no and directed her to the museum next door, which was having an event and was open late. We don't usually let people use the bathroom in the store because we store household chemicals in there, and they have to pass through the workroom, which houses box cutters, tools, the paper cutter, sensitive information, and the staff's personal stuff.
The kids didn't go to the museum, and continued their loud discussion. The older girl read selections from various books to the younger one. They kept racing back and forth between their mother and the toys to tell their mom what they had found.
The older girl came back to the counter and showed me some magnetic earrings. "If these are half price," she asked, "how much are they?" I said, "They're regularly $2.50." I showed her the price tag and asked, "How much is half of $2.50?" She knitted her brow and was silent for a few moments. I tried to help by breaking the problem down. "How much is half of two?" She knitted her brow. I held up two fingers. "If the earrings cost two dollars, how much is half of two?" "One?" she asked. I figured if she had trouble dividing two by two, dividing 50 by two would be impossible, so I said, "These are $1.25." "Sweet!" she said, and went to show her mom. The younger one found a bird call.
Bird call: Here, birdy, birdy, birdy.Finally, after an hour, they all hove up to the counter. They had found the bird call and the earrings. The mother handed me the laminated easy-fold roadmap of New Mexico and said she didn't want it after all. They paid for their purchase and left. As they walked to the door, I saw that the pants of the younger girl were sopping wet. I thought, you don't suppose she . . . .
I went around to the front of the counter, and there it was: a puddle of urine. I was really steamed because the kid had peed her pants on our carpet; the mother was apparently so oblivious that she didn't notice the wet pants, and if she did notice them, she didn't wonder how they got that way; and if she did know how they got that way, why she didn't offer to clean up the puddle.
I got out the Lysol disinfectant and carpet cleaner and started mopping up the puddle. Perry, who had been training a new employee, asked, "Do we have a biohazard?"
After a while my anger at the mother abated. Now I just feel sad for them.
2 comments:
I certainly hope the day's events don't dampen your enthusiasm for bookselling! Are you keeping notes so you can wrie a book about bookselling?
How sad! At least they went away with something good!
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