Customers

As per Steve's request, I'll tell you about a few of our regular customers.  

Guatemala guy

There's one guy that hangs out in the cafe several days a week that the cafe girls call the Guatemala guy.  He just gets a coffee and sits in the cafe for several hours.  Sometimes he sits and talks to the other regulars.  I was helping in the cafe one day and he asked me who I was and where I came from.  I showed him my name badge and said Springville and walked off.  I usually play dumb when people ask me where I come from when I know they are wanting to know my ethnicity.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't rude to him when I say I walked off.  I just didn't what to get stuck in ackward small talk.  

Ol' crunchy

That's not his nickname, he doesn't have one that I know of.  He's an old tall guy with gray hair to his shoulders.  That isn't the worst part though.  His hair is always so crusted over with who knows what.  It's pretty disgusting.  Sometimes he wears sunglasses inside.  Oh, and he also likes to hang out in the cafe for several hours.  Not very appetizing looking at that crusty head.  I cringe when I see him cause he's in our store every other day.  I heard our new assistant manager asking one of the other managers about him.  Pretty sad when you walk in on the tale end of a conversation and only hear them say something about crusty hair and you know who they're talking about.  Good ol' crunchy.  

No Teeth

I saved the best for last.  There's another regular named Curtis that one of the employees calls "no teeth", because he is missing half of his teeth.  He comes in a few times a week and has us look up a bunch of random books for him.  Some of the books he finds in graphic novel magazines, so he brings in all these ISBN's to look up.  100% of the books, we don't carry in the store.  Once I got stuck helping him when I was new and didn't know what he was up to.  He had a list of random books to look up, then he asked if we had any books about: the history of western music, the Everglades, and other random books.  He will keep on asking if you let him, and he'll ask for a printout of the books he's asking for.  A printout is just a printout of the search results with the title, author and subject.  So if you let him get away with it, he will request several pages of printouts for random books that, 90% of the time, we don't carry in the store.  I've even seen him bring the printouts back in and have us look them up again to see if the books ever came in.  He is the biggest waste of time because he never buys anything and he makes the other customers wait in line while he has the employees look up random stuff that he wouldn't buy even if we had it in the store.  If I see him in the store I will steer clear of the customer service desk so I won't get stuck helping him.  The rule is that he is only allowed to look up four titles and one printout.  Every once in a while an unsuspecting employee that doesn't know what he's up to, gets stuck with him and we have to rescue them.  I was so happy one day when I was caught by him at the customer service desk and our printer just happened to be broken.  I told him it would be broken for about a week until we got a replacement one in.  That was a week of uninterrupted bliss.

One of my favorite things about working at Barnes & Noble is that the clientele is so much better than at Kmart.  I have only been asked if I speak Spanish once and it was only  by someone who wanted to practice their Spanish they were learning.  Also it's a book store, so people can actually read.  People still allow their children to run around unattended so our children's department is always trashed.  Today this lady had three kids with her, which ran ramped though the children's department while she shopped for books.  The boy was jumping off of the benches and she didn't say anything, so I told him to not do it so he wouldn't get hurt, of course, after I said that, he did it again and hurt himself.  That was when the mom said to stop.  There was also a little girl that was pulling all the stuffed animals off the fixture and throwing them on the floor, while another little girl pushed over some floor stacks of books and removed the dust covers off some of them.  All of this, the mom turned a blind eye to.  The boy then decided to rip open a box with a toy in it which she justified for him saying someone else had already started ripping it open so it was okay for him to finish the job.  She was asking for books about helping children with speech impediments.  I should have directed her to the section for child discipline.  

There are also people who come in every once in a while looking for a book that they don't know the name of and don't know the author.  Gee, thanks for narrowing it down for us.  Friday nights are "date nights" which I don't understand.  People come in apparently on dates and hang out at Barnes & Noble all night.  Most of the time they don't buy anything and leave a stack of 10 books each for us to put away.  Sometimes we have to force them to hand them over because it'll be 15 minutes to closing time and they'll be sitting there with a stack of books.  We'll ask them if they're done with any of them and they'll say no.  We then have to ask them if they are buying any of them because they're not going to have time to look through a stack of 10 books in 10 minutes.  We have to pretty much just take them anyway so we have enough time to put the books away before we go home for the night.   One lady was mad because I kicked her out of the store 10 minutes after closing time.  She said "But I'm not buying anything"  EXACTLY!  We're not going to let people stay in the store and browse after closing time, just because they aren't buying anything.  Some people are clueless.  We have a lot of people that just come in a read magazines all day and then just leave them sitting in a pile.  I think our store is probably one of the worst for this because apparently the customers in the Salt Lake area don't leave as many stacks of books and magazines laying around after looking at them.  People will sit down in the middle of the aisle and read with their legs sprawled out.  Some won't even move when you try to get a book out from behind them or are trying to get around them because they have blocked the aisle.  Every once in a while, one of the employees will find a book about someone's first gay experience or some other book from the sexuality section, in the mens restroom.  One time I was collecting unwanted books in the lounge area and I asked a guy if he was done with a stack of books on the floor next to him.  He said "You mean all those books about sex?  Those aren't mine."  Okay, whatever you say.  I didn't know that there was also a name for "adult magazines"  they're called "sophisticates".  What a "sophisticated" name for something so dirty.  I wonder who made up the term and their rationale.  One employee thought it was some kind of business magazine when they heard the word.

I've also noticed that there are far less customer complaints.  No more, "No wonder you're going out of business".  There was one person that tried to say "Why would I buy a member card for a company that's going out of business?"  the employee politely informed the customer that Borders was going out of business, not Barnes & Noble.  I guess Borders is having some problems and is looking to sell.  Barnes & Noble is actually a debt free company.  Right now they are getting a little strict on payroll expenses because they figured out that if they kept trending the same path, they'd be in debt in 20 years.  Kind of funny that they are already freaking out about something foreseen to happen 20 years down the road.

Well I hope my rambling about work was somewhat enjoyable.  Overall I really like my job and am 80% less stressed then I used to be when I worked at Kmart.  I am so glad that I decided to leave, and I am way lucky to have the job that I have.  For those of you that I didn't tell, I just had enough at Kmart and came home and turned in my notice after work one day.  I didn't have a job lined up.  That was the scariest thing for me was not knowing what was going to happen.  Luckily, Chris and I had enough money saved up that we would be fine with me not working for a month or more if we were desperate.  I was only unemployed for 2 weeks, thankfully.  In about the middle of that 2nd week I was getting a little anxiety from not having a job.  I'm a Sjoberg after all, worrying is what we do.  In the end, I ended up making only a few thousand less a year than I was at Kmart, and only working 40 hours a week (hourly) verses the 48-60 hours a week that I worked as salaried.  So I ended up better off if you figure out what I ended up making hourly in reality.  I was so mad at myself for staying there for so long, being so severely underpaid (which became grossly apparent after I quit).  Pretty pathetic when you are considered one of the best at what you do in your district, and yet are one of the lowest paid.  If I stayed, I could have renegotiated my wage to a much higher pay and I could have gotten an extra week of vacation for staying.  In the end, I realized that money isn't everything and my sanity was more important.  I knew that the environment I was in was making me an angry person, and a big complainer (I am a complainer by nature but it was making my complaining over the top).  Since leaving, I've noticed that I'm less angry at people in general, and I hardly ever swear.  Yes, it's sad to say, I would use profanity at Kmart on a regular basis.  My favorite word was another word for a fatherless child.  Now my favorite word is "nemesis".  Thanks Steve.  Now every time I hear the word I think of you and laugh.  Good times.  Anyways, leaving Kmart was the best decision I ever made in my life.  Except of course, marrying my little knuckle head sweetie.  ;-) By the way.  Chris' new nickname I gave him is monkey, or just Monk for short.  Most of the time I call him "silly little monk".  It's funny how we at first called each other sweetie and then over the years evolved into calling each other Knuckle head, then Knuckie or Knuck for short.  Now I'm calling Chris Monk.  Is this what happens when you're married for a while?  I realize now that after we have kids it probably wouldn't be a good idea to continue doing this because the kids get confused and think that it's your name.  I wouldn't mind my kids calling me sweetie but could you imaging your kids calling you a knuckle head or a monkey?  Not so good.

Oh, and about the weather.  Yesterday it was about 80 degrees and today it snowed which only confirms my statement about the weather here being a little on the crazy side.