Spring

The other night on the evening news, the weather guys is saying that the "next couple days are going to be pretty quiet. Nothing much to talk about."

He the preceded to talk for 5 minutes about how much nothing was going to happen.

And anyone that was watching will never get the time back.

Equality

So I am, once again, working at the bookstore. These two middle-aged African-American women are standing near the customer service desk looking a little lost. I stop and ask them if they need help with anything. They turn and look at me and ask if the tables in front of them are all the sale books we have. I answer yes. The one gets an attitude with me and says "I see. Y'all don't have any African-American books. Interesting. Well then, we'll just look around."

I tried to explain that the books that end up on the sale tables are the ones that there was a large amount of backstock from the publisher. So by not having any leftovers to send to us, they must be selling really well.

This didn't seem to help. The attitude was still there.

I walked away to take care of something, leaving them to wander around. There wasn't much else I could do at that point.

When I returned back to the customer service desk, another woman began to approach me. She was a middle-aged white woman. I asked her the same question, did she need help finding anything.

She looked at me and asked if these tables were all my sale books. Having a moment of deja vu, I paused for a minute. I answered "yes".

She smiled, "oh, cause you don't have any books for chubby white women."

I smiled at her and had to walk away.

Teenage boys...

Last week I worked at the store with a wonderful woman - C - who I would guess to be about the same age as my mother. She used to work in a library. She's very nice and great to work with. And I totally respect the fact that she doesn't take alot of crap from customers. She has wonderful customer service skills, but manages to use them to point out to people that their kids are running around, being obnoxious, damaging product, that she'll wait until they're off their cell phone to help them, etc. You get the drift.

Last week, there were three teenage boys look at the sex books. Standing there giggling. They were pretty obvious, but not being overly obnoxious so we left them alone. Once they were done, they were snickering to each other, laughing. C asked them if they were done giggling now. She stopped for a second and said 'yes'. C was working on climbing a ladder to put books up into the overstock area on top of the bookshelves. She grabbed a stack of the books she was working on and handed them to the boys as said "Good. Since you're done, hand these to me."

I doubt that they will be back to look at those books again any time soon. Or if they do, they'll probably make sure that she's not working.

Shopping for sheets...

So I'm wandering around a newly opened department store in the area this past weekend. It's a beautiful store. Much more room than the space they previously occupied. Beautiful displays. And my favorite part - lots of stuff on sale for the weekend. As I wandered around the bedding department, I saw a display of some type of natural sheets (going with the whole 'green' thing). So I stopped to check them out and see what was so special about them. Then I started reading the label.

"Absorbent sheets"

Now maybe I'm a little weird, but I need absorbent towels, not absorbent sheets. And I want to know if they've ever had a someone who bought them because they're 'absorbent'.