Bookshop
So, am currently working at the bookshop... volunteering at the bookshop... which doesn't pay anyone except the managers, because no one ever buys stuff, and it's also run by anarchists... and communists... both of which, I think, don't believe in paying people with the money produced by our current capitalist hegemony. They must be very pleased that we mostly don't make a profit.
Speaking of, when I was doing the register tally, we had a one-dollar bill with what looked like a big drop of dry blood on it. Ew ew ew.
Obviously, if the capitalist system worked, I should at least be washing dishes FOR MONEY at this point. I can do a job! And I'm fairly fluent in Spanish! And...
Fickle finger of invisible hand of market fucking with me; does not care about the working man, never mind the nonworking woman.
And I had to get up at like the crack of dawn (8 AM) to get on the Suck My Dick I'm A Busdriver Express... seriously, the bus dropped me off fifteen entire minutes early because the driver just zoomed on by any stops where there wasn't actually someone standing right there, you know, jumping up and down and sticking out their thumb... waving a towel... offering her gold-plated caviar... She actually drove right past a guy who was like ten feet from the bus stop, looking up at her all sad and making pleading gestures. Honestly, WTF, evil lady. Where's the fire? No, don't even tell me, 'cos you're not driving a fire truck.
We have an enormous A-frame board that stands on the sidewalk. It's very heavy and comes up to my chest. I want to weigh it some day. I'm guessing it weighs over seventy pounds. Fucking thing. I can't lift it. I have to kind of make it walk by picking up one side and swiveling on one of its corners. The information is out of date, too. Apparently, it gets updated by people painting over the old information. Perhaps it's so heavy due to the sheer accumulation of paint.
Two people with two small children each came in today. The first wanted to know if the stickers are free; they are not. Then she wandered over to our neighboring gift shop for obnoxious neo-hippie potheads (this block seems to be trying to run the local counterculture all by its lonesome) and was told, because her adorable little toddler left her sight for a moment, "Ma'am, you've got to keep a better eye on your kid." So she came back and the kid, with his about-five-year-old big brother as accomplice, turned on and knocked over the fan, and started having a tantrum. So she got them out. It's okay, really, staying in her with your crying little anklebiters, the anarchists like chaos, and if they don't they should.
Fucking anarchists. It's like social Darwinism for the under-25 set.
Then a middle-aged Englishman came in, with two children much too tiny to be his and who also seemed to be calling him Tim, who wanted to find George Lukács' The History of Class Consciousness (not Star Wars). And it seemed to be in our catalogue! Great, right? Couldn't find it. Looked all over while the little girl complained about the yoghurt on her little brother's face. Apart from the yoghurt, he was wearing a onesie as a shirt over his shorts. Poor Tim. Poor us. That was like our one potential sale of the day...
A woman came in actually wearing an actual slip under her skirt. I could tell because her huge shoulder bag had hiked her skirt up half the way. She said our books are very interesting, scuffed all the way around the shop, and left.
Someone has put a note on our cork board. The note reads:
"Do you have:
PUNK and metal band
Patches? Jeffrey Wants them so fucking bad!"
But the first "o" contains an upside-down pentagram and the letters are all generally heterogeneous and fucked-up-looking. I can't really convey the first line properly; the letters basically look like they were made from the rotting corpses of the Gashlycrumb Tinies. Kind of that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark style. I think Jeffrey may be in fucking middle school. And the general effect is that Jeffrey is such an idiot that he spent fifteen minutes awkwardly writing this overwrought note asking us this when we actually have A GREAT BIG DISPLAY of punk patches for however much you care to pay. Or does he want band stuff? Order that FROM THE BAND.
CD Alley (say it with me) next door keeps our key for us, because they pay their employees I guess and so their employees don't steal shit, and also is playing loud techno today. Die.
And on our other side, we have... TOMCATS II. Guess what that is? It's a Legitimate Businessmen's Massage Parlor. A mob front disguised as... something sexy for sale. WTF. I think our hours and theirs don't overlap, though, since... they're never open! Or, at least, they don't seem open even at midnight.
A very quiet, skinny, middle-aged guy just bought an eleven-dollar magazine on nudism. Bless. First sale of the day! We've been open for an hour and twenty minutes! People just come in here to look at our books and erode our linoleum!...
And a guy just came in and chuckled at all our bumper stickers, said, "Great store," and left. The comedy club is that way! But they do charge admission.
Also, a few weeks back, we had an obvious break-in but nothing got stolen. The alarm was blaring and the door was unlocked. We've got a security service but the security company doesn't care about trustafarian people, I guess. Natch, they called and sent the police purely to embarrass me when I set the alarm off by mistake, and sounded really concerned over the phone. They are fucking with us.
It's nice to have good material to kvetch about, though...
Speaking of, when I was doing the register tally, we had a one-dollar bill with what looked like a big drop of dry blood on it. Ew ew ew.
Obviously, if the capitalist system worked, I should at least be washing dishes FOR MONEY at this point. I can do a job! And I'm fairly fluent in Spanish! And...
Fickle finger of invisible hand of market fucking with me; does not care about the working man, never mind the nonworking woman.
And I had to get up at like the crack of dawn (8 AM) to get on the Suck My Dick I'm A Busdriver Express... seriously, the bus dropped me off fifteen entire minutes early because the driver just zoomed on by any stops where there wasn't actually someone standing right there, you know, jumping up and down and sticking out their thumb... waving a towel... offering her gold-plated caviar... She actually drove right past a guy who was like ten feet from the bus stop, looking up at her all sad and making pleading gestures. Honestly, WTF, evil lady. Where's the fire? No, don't even tell me, 'cos you're not driving a fire truck.
We have an enormous A-frame board that stands on the sidewalk. It's very heavy and comes up to my chest. I want to weigh it some day. I'm guessing it weighs over seventy pounds. Fucking thing. I can't lift it. I have to kind of make it walk by picking up one side and swiveling on one of its corners. The information is out of date, too. Apparently, it gets updated by people painting over the old information. Perhaps it's so heavy due to the sheer accumulation of paint.
Two people with two small children each came in today. The first wanted to know if the stickers are free; they are not. Then she wandered over to our neighboring gift shop for obnoxious neo-hippie potheads (this block seems to be trying to run the local counterculture all by its lonesome) and was told, because her adorable little toddler left her sight for a moment, "Ma'am, you've got to keep a better eye on your kid." So she came back and the kid, with his about-five-year-old big brother as accomplice, turned on and knocked over the fan, and started having a tantrum. So she got them out. It's okay, really, staying in her with your crying little anklebiters, the anarchists like chaos, and if they don't they should.
Fucking anarchists. It's like social Darwinism for the under-25 set.
Then a middle-aged Englishman came in, with two children much too tiny to be his and who also seemed to be calling him Tim, who wanted to find George Lukács' The History of Class Consciousness (not Star Wars). And it seemed to be in our catalogue! Great, right? Couldn't find it. Looked all over while the little girl complained about the yoghurt on her little brother's face. Apart from the yoghurt, he was wearing a onesie as a shirt over his shorts. Poor Tim. Poor us. That was like our one potential sale of the day...
A woman came in actually wearing an actual slip under her skirt. I could tell because her huge shoulder bag had hiked her skirt up half the way. She said our books are very interesting, scuffed all the way around the shop, and left.
Someone has put a note on our cork board. The note reads:
"Do you have:
PUNK and metal band
Patches? Jeffrey Wants them so fucking bad!"
But the first "o" contains an upside-down pentagram and the letters are all generally heterogeneous and fucked-up-looking. I can't really convey the first line properly; the letters basically look like they were made from the rotting corpses of the Gashlycrumb Tinies. Kind of that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark style. I think Jeffrey may be in fucking middle school. And the general effect is that Jeffrey is such an idiot that he spent fifteen minutes awkwardly writing this overwrought note asking us this when we actually have A GREAT BIG DISPLAY of punk patches for however much you care to pay. Or does he want band stuff? Order that FROM THE BAND.
CD Alley (say it with me) next door keeps our key for us, because they pay their employees I guess and so their employees don't steal shit, and also is playing loud techno today. Die.
And on our other side, we have... TOMCATS II. Guess what that is? It's a Legitimate Businessmen's Massage Parlor. A mob front disguised as... something sexy for sale. WTF. I think our hours and theirs don't overlap, though, since... they're never open! Or, at least, they don't seem open even at midnight.
A very quiet, skinny, middle-aged guy just bought an eleven-dollar magazine on nudism. Bless. First sale of the day! We've been open for an hour and twenty minutes! People just come in here to look at our books and erode our linoleum!...
And a guy just came in and chuckled at all our bumper stickers, said, "Great store," and left. The comedy club is that way! But they do charge admission.
Also, a few weeks back, we had an obvious break-in but nothing got stolen. The alarm was blaring and the door was unlocked. We've got a security service but the security company doesn't care about trustafarian people, I guess. Natch, they called and sent the police purely to embarrass me when I set the alarm off by mistake, and sounded really concerned over the phone. They are fucking with us.
It's nice to have good material to kvetch about, though...