A Bookstore Tale

I had worked in the bookstore part-time for about 6 months before I graduated from AIU. After I graduated I started working there full-time while I was looking for my career job. Being in retail, the job offered a lot of interactions with all kinds of different people. When the doors opened in the morning, you never quite knew what to expect – it depended on who would come through those doors and what moods and attitudes they would bring with them. 

One thing you could always count on though was the regulars. My favorite regular was a short, kind, old man named Jack. He would come in almost every evening and stay for several hours. He always greeted me by saying: “Working hard?” and when I replied, like I always did, “Hardly working”, he responded with a big grin – the joke never got old to him. Jack would browse the books, eventually pick one out, and then read it for a few hours in our cafe until we closed, or until his son came and got him. He never bought anything. He would occasionally shoplift though. The first time I saw it, I mentioned it to my manager. We were standing right by the register on the first floor and he walked out the front doors with an obvious stash underneath his jacket. When I pointed it out to my manager she said: “There is no point in humiliating him, he his senile and he doesn’t know what he is doing. His son will bring the book back tomorrow.” At that moment I gained a lot of respect for her - it showed some real insight and compassion to let him do that; and she was right, the son did bring the book back. Other managers did stop him when they caught him, but they always did it in a quiet and respectful way. I found out later that the reason Jack came by the store all the time was because his wife had recently passed away and he couldn’t stand to be in the house alone.

There were several other regulars but nobody quite like Jack. I suppose my second favorite would be the guy who actually helped me do my job. For whatever reason (sadly I never found out) this guy – who we would refer to as the “Sci-Fi Guy” would come in about once a week and alphapetize the books in the Science Fiction section. He never bought anything, nor did he read anything while in the store, he would just obsessively make sure that all the books were in alpabetical order. It was of course ok with all of the book store employees because he wasn’t disturbing anyone, and he was really just providing a free service. It was fascinating to me though. I wondered if he did it because, like Jack, he was lonely, or, because he was obsessive about order when it came to his favorite genre. I guess I will never know.

I enjoyed working in the bookstore; as someone with a passion for books it was a great place to work. I worked with a wonderfully diverse group of people and the one thing we had in common was our interest in reading. Although the daily tasks didn’t vary much, each day was always a little different depending on who came into the store. Each day you would witness behavior that was bizarre, depressing, interesting, or just flat out hilarious. For those memories, I will always be thankful.

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