if you're reading this

Dear Person Who Thinks That A Catchy Way to Get the Attention of a Prospective Employer is to Drop Letters at Intervals Around the Store You Hope To Work In (I'll call you PWTTACWTGTAOAPEITDL@IATSYHTWI; I hope that's not too informal for you),

You might recognize yourself from your salutation: "If you're reading this, it means I have already submitted my resume to you!"

While I commend your creativity, I feel that someone should point out to you the actual effect of your letter-dropping, at least in my workplace.

1. I found your letter on the floor of the elevator.

2. I wondered (admittedly, not very seriously) if your letter was full of Dire!Poison!

3. I handed it over to a supervisor, who rolled their eyes, because this was the fifth such letter they had received from you.

After the first time, which I will admit would have made me go and look up your resume to see if I wanted to hire you, although I make no such claims on behalf of any of my managers, it's just littering. If doing it once does not get you the result you hope for, I suggest you move on, because at that point you can determine that either this tactic doesn't get you the right kind of attention, or that the issue is your resume. Perhaps that is where you should direct your energy.

PWTTACWTGTAOAPEITDL@IATSYHTWI, I'm not trying to be a bitch here. I'm trying to help you get a job. Good luck.

'col

grumble grumble grumble...huzzah!

Well, I seem to be feeling...marginally better. I'll take marginally; any margin is an improvement. It makes me laugh that I can tell I'm feeling better because I've started to be cross about all the mess at work. (Dear Christmas Shoppers, thank you for keeping me in a job through this early, scary bit of recession. Now do you suppose you could go away, just for a few days, so that I can clean up? With luck, by the time you come back I may be able to find your books on the shelves where they belong.)

Other things I was cross about this weekend: the fact that the Indianapolis Colts were replaced by clowns in their playoff game and lost like fools to San Diego. The Chargers played very well, but I'm unable to sit back and admire them because their quarterback is a douchebag, and now they're going to play my beloved Steelers so I have to watch his awful smarmy face for a whole other game. Peyton Manning could have saved me from all this.

I choose to view my crankiness as a good sign.

instant karma

One of the people who was rude to me yesterday got arrested in our store today for shoplifting. This pleases me maybe a little more than it should.

cheerful, calm and helpful

I am heartily sick of the general public, and it's only November 27th.

"I just hit the wall." I told Geoffrey.
"Don't say that! We have six more weeks!" Liar. It's...well, okay, by the time you factor in Boxing Day sales, it's almost six weeks. I remind myself that 75% of the exasperating behavior I witness is not the result of people being jerks, it is the result of people being in a crowded, overwhelming, unfamiliar environment. It's the other twenty-five percent I have trouble with. Lady, I have explained in a clear and friendly manner why you cannot sit in front of the shelves. I have even invoked wheelchair access. You know, access? So that people can move around as freely as possible in the mall which at the best of times is challenging but during holidays takes on a nightmare quality? That. People might want to look at those books that you're leaning on. Don't be mean about it.

In fact, here's my new rule for how adults should behave (also known as "Why I will never be Empress of the world"): if you can't measure up to the standards I would have for a toddler in my care, you should have to take a timeout. If it's good enough for a three-year-old, it's good enough for you. Say please. Say thank you. Share the toys. Wash your hands. Don't wait for re-election to say that you won't scream at people in Parliament any more. You know, the basics.

Since this also applies to me, I am going to spend my evening doing something soothing, so that tomorrow I'll be ready to go back and face people again, the majority of whom are actually much nicer than you'd think. Just--thank god I get a break till tomorrow.

p.s. Thanks to Ben and Jillian for bringing cookies to us retail drudges. It warms a girl's heart.

baby, baby, it looks like it's gonna hail

At one point this week, I was considering joining the "shelving party" at my store on Sunday night. Sunday, which is my birthday. (We could get a cake!) I think I am...not considering this any more. It's just that this birthday has crept up on me, and I have made absolutely no plans, and trying to plan mostly makes me want to close my eyes in exhaustion, so hey, why not shelve? And make some money? And possibly get cake out of it?

The first thing in ages that's made me feel energetic is accidentally rediscovering the Louis Prima/Keely Smith version of "Jump Jive an' Wail." That is because swing is awesome, and makes me want to dance even when I'm so tired I can hardly think. Huzzah, swing music! Now I am poking around the internets for more songs that make me want to dance. Suggestions? Happy birthday to me!

exhale

"I'm not good at failure!" I sobbed. Greg kept rubbing my back, giving me space for my abject, snotty misery.
"It's not your failure."
"I'm not that good at other people's failure, either. In case you hadn't noticed." There was a hiccup, and then we both started laughing, and I got up to get a kleenex, and now, my belly full of reassurances and the pasta that Lizbeth made for dinner, I can finally breathe again, air this time and not the stale sense of disappointment in myself I was suffocating on all day.

I'll be glad when the Christmas season is over this year. It is not going well. I can hardly get my bearings for bailing out the boat. What is going well, though, is that there seems to always be someone there to pick me up and put me on my feet again, and I am very grateful.

never let 'em see you sweat

Today, a day that included both slamming my hand into the corner of a table hard enough to leave visible bruising and falling off a ladder, was the best day of my week. This is, in part, due to Greg's motivational speaking skills--apparently I just needed someone to tell me "You will have a good day tomorrow" in a confident manner. I did not finish all the things that needed to be finished, largely because finishing them would have defied all laws of nature, but I did knock out a few things that had been bothering me. There was a terrible Oh Hell No moment, but Mathabo swooped in and rescued me. I think the rest of my calm came from knowing that no matter what I did or didn't accomplish, my workday would be over at two, and I would get to go home to my snuggly sheets and my room-mate and my boy and my cats.

My cats who are very busy auditioning for a buddy cop movie. Tish is the hardbitten veteran who doesn't want a new partner, dammit, Max is her fresh-faced rookie sidekick and Roo is...maybe the dispatcher. Or that woman in the office who hands them the right file at the critical moment. In support of this theory, Roo has been trying to operate the remote control, walking over it to change the channel to "Lethal Weapon" while Elizabeth was trying to watch "Jon and Kate Plus 8."

keep calm and carry on

My friend Geoffrey, in his capacity as my boss, keeps taking my hand and earnestly repeating "Not more than the usual amount of fretting," until I say it back to him. Not more than the usual amount of fretting. What I failed to take into account is the equation for "how much is the usual amount of fretting" in regard to what's actually going on in my life right now.

Work, although it is much more under control on my front since I started working the early shift, is in all other respects a runaway train: we're undergoing a renovation that hasn't even started yet and is already a week behind schedule. During this period we need to be hiring and training roughly fifty seasonal staff. The Christmas product will be arriving any moment. We're down two managers, although I did learn today that we've hired a general manager who will get to start in early October, lucky her. (I did put out a general call this morning over unpacking to ask could we please, please, not put on our judgypants for the first few weeks while she adjusts to working with new people in a new company at the worst possible time of year to start a retail management position--pretty please?--and after that, I don't care, judge away! Go nuts! But if I have to listen to my beloved and generally quite awesome co-workers display their worst, pettiest behavior in the middle of the rest of this I will go batshit crazy and start screaming, fret-levels be damned.)

Then there's the ongoing conversation with the dear friend who's offered to be my sperm donor. The conversation isn't a problem, it's finding the time to sit down and have it. Granted, negotiating the use of someone's semen is awkward, even if you thought you'd got all the possible awkward out of the way in university by doing hideously insensitive things to one another and then processing for months. (Writing songs about your feelings optional.) It's not like it's a prerequisite, but there is probably no better preparation for this kind of awkward than having shared a decade of overearnest and yes, strangely literal friendship peppered with conversation about the big things: values, ideas, girls. But the hideous stress-taffy that is emailing about something important makes me feel bad, and feel bad about adding stress to my friend's busy life, and in the meantime I'm full of crazy anxiety-born thoughts about my age, and my reproductive health, and my dubious qualifications for parenthood. It feels like the stress is sitting on my brain and squishing it out my ears, such that my response to a most recent email in which he says that we could possibly talk on "the non-zoo day" caused this moment of panic:

wait, there's a zoo day now? what about the zoo? am I going to the zoo? is this a metaphorical thing, like "things are a zoo around here?" how can I possibly not know if zoo-related activites are going on? why did I buy a damn daytimer anyway, if not to help me out of this kind of confusion? is there any way to ask about this without sounding like a total crazy person?

Uh, no.

In an apparent non-sequitir, we just got back from visiting Jennifer in Ottawa. Jen is one of those friends that overwrought maniacs like me cherish due to her ability to calm me down by treating me like a lovable doofus and giving me advice in short, easily understood sentences*. In this case, I am ordering for myself the very poster that hangs in Jen's living room



although I may order it in a seafoam colour. More calming still.



* I cherish Jennifer for other reasons as well, as she knows, but it just looked a little cold sitting there. I thought I'd clarify.

you broke my heart at the FunPlex

"Have you talked to Steve lately?"
"No, why?" [a suspiciously familiar silence falls] "Wait, why?"

It seems my erstwhile co-worker Steve is leaving to volunteer at a newspaper in Romania. Or at least, that's what he says--there might be some other, more sinister explanation. This latest defection from the Geek Squad is surprisingly hard on my morale. Of course, some of our departing geeks come back (hi, Thea!), but I live in fear of being surrounded by people who stare blankly when I talk about building my doomsday machine. Who's going to accuse me of moral bankruptcy and/or irrational jingoism? Who's going to slander Joss Whedon? Who's going to bring me magazine articles about zombies, or create tiny dinosaurs out of modeling foam and make them talk to me in squeaky voices when I'm having a bad day?

Normally this is where I would issue a decree about how no one else is allowed to go anywhere, for any reason, for the rest of our natural lives, but so many people have moved on in the last little while that the joke doesn't make me feel any better. So, uh, fly free little birds, or something. I love that people I am fond of are testing their limits, bravely stretching themselves into the world. I just hate that it takes them away from me.

defense against the dark arts

My manager is leaving. This would not be such a big deal except that she is awesome, and also, she is the third person to hold this position since February. I have changed my manager more than I have changed my hair this year.

Perhaps it's time for a mohawk.

"This tone in my voice? I dislike it more than you do. And I'm closer to it."

You know what I'm sick of? The sound of my own voice, whining. A number of work-related nonsenses have just dragged on and on and on and on and on over the last year, and I have tried pretty much everything in my power (a sadly limited range of options) to change them. And there hasn't really been a lot of change. This makes me sad, because I love my job, at least I used to. And just like stepping on a rake, it occurs me how very very closely this parallels a completely unrelated scenario I have been giving advice about. Oh, Nicole. How do they say among my people? Duh.

And here's my stellar advice: I can take a deep breath (realistically, probably a lot of them), realize it's out of my hands, and try to figure out whether I can develop a sense of joy about this job the way it is. Not the way I wish it was. Not the way it would be if certain other people fell on their heads and/or received miraculous personality transplants. But in the current circumstances, can I reconnect to the sense of fun and purpose I want to have in my life?

If yes, I've solved my problem. If no, I can look for another job. I can also hang around pretending to be powerless for another year, but having put it that way to myself, my friends, and the entire internet, it doesn't sound like a very good choice. And I did kind of promise myself (remember being nineteen and arrogant, A.? We were smart back then) that my life was not going to be just something that happened to me.

itinerary

Despite being wakened by my cats somewhere in the dismal realm of 5:30 this morning, today started out pretty strong. (Although, cats? If you find yourselves listed for sale on Ebay, you know why. And don't try to pretend you don't surf the internet, I'm on to you. Ahem.) I ran through my traditional Saturday start: Tim Hortons for a Coffee As Big As My Head and some sugary thing that will eventually kill me, swing upstairs through the back hall, sit at the staff room table for a few minutes, go survey the damage and start work.

Oh, and damage there is. I was sick for a week, so my section's been down a body, and we have ten carts of shelving. Ten. Ten. I realize this may be hard to conceptualize if you don't work in a bookstore, but to put it in some terms that make sense, two carts of shelving, the way we stack 'em, is a feasible amount to get through in a day. That's a day that starts at seven o' clock in the morning and ends at ten o'clock at night. There's some give in this formula--sometimes you can whip through three or maybe even four, and some days getting through half of one is the Labours of Hercules, but--you get the picture. Roughly. Also, someone or someones have gone completely insane and thrown the merchandising rules to the wind, so things are in the wrong sections, shelved incorrectly in the right sections, shelved according to some new and exciting alphabet known only to its originator, sitting in random stacks under tables they bear no relation to. Your basic nightmare. Today, I was finding it all strangely undaunting.

What I had not accounted for, in my grand spirit of rolling up my sleeves and digging in, was the rain. My bookstore is in a mall, you see, and bad weather means we get an exponentially larger than normal number of people either shopping or milling around aimlessly in the aisles. This...happened.

Gentle readers, I am exhausted. It's six thirty and I'm thinking about when I can reasonably go to bed.

In the meantime, though, I'm watching the gray, romantic rain through my bedroom window. My semi-forgiven cat is practicing her yoga just past my knees. I'm contemplating trying my hand at fanfiction. Things are basically good in the world.

"I want more options!" "Don't we all?"

Random dude: "I'm looking for Neil Strauss."
Me: "Oh. The Game." [stands up, brushes dust off pantlegs, heads in direction of book]
RD: "You know it."
Me: "Yep."
RD: "Does it work on you?"
Me: "Lemme see: sad men trying to make a connection with women and sabotaging themselves because they chose manipulation as their opening gambit?" [two beats] "No."
RD: "Come on, you can't lie to a woman, I mean, if she falls for it..."
Me: [rounding on the dude with that smile that's more like showing my teeth] "Let me ask you this: if you lie to a woman and she believes you, who exactly is at fault there?"
RD: "You can go away now."
Me: [customer service smile] "Have a nice afternoon!"

There was a much less amusing story featured in one of our local weeklies about pickup artists (or, as they're apparently called, PUAs--pwahs?--am I the only person who thinks that acronym should be avoided at all costs?) and the pickup scene, which is apparently big in my city. Huh. For the record, I am not against the notion of picking up, or the idea of casual sex. All I ask is that all parties give informed consent, (which, duh, means that you can't lie to each other about what you're looking for out of the experience) and that everybody tries to make sure that everybody else is having a good time. If that seems like an unreasonably stringent standard to you, then don't bother commenting, because we have nothing to say to each other.

(I'm not going to link to the article, because frankly I don't have time or energy to handle the trolls and all the tedious, tedious things I know they'd call me, but if you would like to throw up in your mouth a little, you can find it by googling "pickup artist" along with "worship the cock." Yeah.)

One of the discussions we had at my place about it was about whether the author had a responsibility to frame the discussion a bit more around the guy she was profiling. My opinion on the subject is that while there's a valid critique about whether you want to give this man a lot of airtime, framing the discussion would have been a mistake, because it implies that there's a discussion to be had. There isn't. Not with this guy. Because he fucking hates women. There's no discussion possible with that level of pathology. The guys you want to discuss with, they're the guys who end up in pickup workshops because they'd just like to meet girls. Maybe for a long-term relationship, maybe for sex. I think there's a hole in the culture where we could be talking about the challenges that men face in meeting women, and an article about that and where/whether the pickup wave falls into that would be...interesting.

Based solely on a short trip down the relationship aisle in the bookstore I can tell you--newsflash--that folks looking for love, sex, and romance have no clue how to go about it. Well, there's no shame in that. Our culture, gender roles, and expectations continue to evolve, and they're damn confusing. I long, however, for strategies which are less depressing; for every book about how to have sex with women you met in bars by being an asshole, there's at least one about how to get some guy (apparently, any guy will do,) to marry you. Also by being an asshole. The Mystery Method, meet The Rules. You totally deserve each other.

"I just hallucinated that the pump truck was a really big skateboard..."

After three days of getting up at 5:30 in the morning for the early shift at work, I think we can safely say that I am not a morning person. The experiment has produced a result: tired. I had lunch with Adam--always good, because the Wondertwin powers operate even when I am stupid with exhaustion--and then came home and went to bed with my cats and my laptop and my Galactica season 3 DVDs. spook will be home soon--is home now, judging by the door sounds and the response of the cats. And since my wacky schedule means I've only spent an hour with him since Tuesday morning, I'm going to go hang out. But I still love you, internets.

Time Traveller's Wife: the gateway drug

It is possible that I have not had my genre-fiction bitch here at the blog. There are all kinds of erudite things I could say about genre snobbery, but at the moment I'm stuck at my first point of reference, which is: if you say to me "Oh, I don't read fantasy," in a voice dripping with contempt, right after you've finished telling me how much you loved Gregory Maguire's Wicked, a novel based on the freaking Wizard of Oz, you richly deserve the dressing-down you'll be getting in the staff room later on.

Luckily, I've been following not one but several spirited discussions about how genre fiction is denigrated by folks who don't read the genre in a variety of sexist, class-based ways. So if you're interested in losing a whole afternoon learning the intracacies of these arguments: what they said.
*

I've been thinking about whether there is a non-snarky way to address this in my job, say, with a clever display. There's got to be some way for me to say "Look, I'm not saying that if you loved the Time Traveller's Wife you're going to love a book with dragons in it. But you might enjoy some other well-written time travel fiction. What do you say you give it a whirl?" Um, in fifty words or less, on a placard.

Any ideas for books I should be linking up? I'll take suggestions in mystery, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, and pretty much anything else you can think of. The thing I'm the weakest on is what literary fiction works I could be using as examples. It just--more things to like in the world, you know? That's got to be a good thing.

*I freely admit that only a tiny bit of the Robin McKinley discussion is about genre, but it ranges freely into people's book prejudices, and I adore Robin McKinley, so any chance to direct people to her is a chance I'll take.

unseasonal thoughts

This just occurred to me:

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen/ Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen/ But do you recall/ The most famous reindeer of all?

Seriously, people, if I know the names of all the un-famous reindeer, under what circumstances do you imagine I would suddenly forget Rudolph? Cheating for an easy rhyme.

I had the same problem with Jim Cuddy. He wrote a song called "Married Again" that we played over. and over. and over. again. You know, local musician, not too much cussing, famous, it's the perfect formula for retail. I digress. The point is this line from the chorus:

Sixteen bottles and a wedding trunk/ Oughta be a law against marrying drunk

It made me insane.

In order to marry, or to enter into any other legally binding contract in Canada, one must have the capacity to give consent, which, dude, if you're that drunk, you don't. So in effect, there is a law. I was greeting at the front door during the Christmas rush that year, and Jim Cuddy actually came in. I had to restrain myself from shouting "There is a law!" while shaking my fist at him. When I told Steve about this, he said

"So...let me get this straight. Jim Cuddy comes in and your first impulse is to yell at him."
"Yes."
"And you're okay with that."
"Yes."

Yes.

Jingle, the Christmas Shrimp

Steve: "How are you?"

Me: [vague flailing gestures in the direction of piles of books] "You know. But you sound really calm."

Steve: "Yeah. I don't have any control over any of this, so..." [shrugs]

Me: "That's a really useful place to be in. I wish I was there."

Steve: "It's a little weird. Dan's been leaving these notes that say things like 'CHAOS. TOTAL CHAOS.' and then they just trail off. And Tom's left one underneath it that said 'Serenity now.' And I left one that said 'Guys. Chill.'"

[beat. Steve and I look at one another.]

Me: "Do you suppose we've slipped into an alternate universe?"

Steve: "It seems really possible, doesn't it? 'Cause personal growth, not likely, but alternate universe? Sure."

Me: "Ooh! Yeah. Like a world without shrimp."

Steve: "What's wrong with shrimp? I like shrimp."

Me: [shuddering] "They're all--they--nothing should have it's eyes on stalks."

[beat.]

Steve: "I am not going to argue with you about shrimp right before Christmas!"

* * * * *

Me: "...so I'm like 'Why? Because it's not seasonal? What if the shrimp were wearing little hats?'"

alex: [deadpan] "Nicole, have you forgotten Jingle the Christmas Shrimp?"

Me: "Christmas Shrimp."

alex: "Yes. You know, you leave a little dish of shrimp sauce by the bathtub drain and he visits you."

Me: "Shrimp sauce? That is so wrong."

alex: "Yes. It's sauce for shrimps."

Elizabeth: "There has been a grotesque cultural misunderstanding about the uses of shrimp sauce."

alex: "And that right there is the history of colonization and oppression."

Gallows Hill and Andersonville / it could be, it could be worse

My friend Geoffrey is quitting smoking. This is a major achievement, as his nicotine habit is older than some of the people we work with, and I am super-proud of him. One might legitimately wonder why, however, someone who works in retail would decide that Christmas was a good choice of timing. My theory? It gets lost in the melee. When the threshold of chaos is so high, what's one more thing? Sure, sure, you'd like a cigarette, but you need to be in twelve places at once, the store has been ravaged by jackals, and you're not completely sure whether the person having a meltdown in the middle of the second floor is a customer or staff. Bring it, I can take it. Besides, there's still coffee.

A little bit macho and/or stupid? Perhaps, but it's how I'm getting through. I, apparently, have chosen this time for some serious revisions of my own, including rewiring a couple of important relationships. Which, and I don't think I can emphasize this enough, sucks. But hey. More piling product onto displays, less crying until I throw up.

I keep telling you I'm only the good cop some of the time

A brief rant regarding competence:

I get that different people have different skills to bring to the table. I really do. A clear example of this plays out between my co-worker Karen and I. She is fantastic with detail, and if you give her a list, she runs down it until it's done. I? Am horrid with detail. But great at answering questions like "I'm looking for this book by a Belgian author...I can't remember her name. It's about a woman. Do you have it?"* And smiling my face off for hours at a time.

I'm also good at being patient with people who are just learning the job. None of it is rocket science** but there are approximately ten thousand details, and nobody is going to remember all of them. There are a lot of honest mistakes to be made, and most people at one time or another will make all of them. This does not trouble me.

But there are other kinds of mistakes that I do not have a lot of patience for. An example: what would possess you to shelve the new Sue Grafton novel in the Investing section? That scanner? Is a machine whose SOLE PURPOSE IS TO GIVE YOU INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK IN YOUR HAND. Is it too much to ask that you press the button and check what it says? Or this: I know that I have said to you "the maximum number of copies you should have on the shelf is a facing and five spines." I have said it until I am hoarse. So when you shelve a facing, and beside it 27 spined copies of a book, is there no little bell that goes off in your mind? Even if you were struck on the head on the way to work that day, how is it possible not to look at that and think "Something has gone terribly awry"!?

And then there's the "I somehow think you have missed the entire point of this" stuff. For example, when you cannot find a book on the shelf, and I say "Okay, check the staff picks wall," do you know what the correct response is? I'll give you a hint. It's not "So...I have to go downstairs?" YES! YES, YOU HAVE TO GO DOWNSTAIRS! Especially when you've just finished telling me that people keep asking you for this book, and the computer thinks we have three copies somewhere. Also, yes, you are expected to smile, yes, you have to make eye contact, and yes, your coworkers will eventually get pissed off if you do nothing at work, thereby making their jobs harder.

:pant pant pant:

I know that lots of people hate their jobs, and I understand that. But if you hate it that much, maybe you're just wasting your life, eight hours at a time. There's got to be something better you could be doing. Like looking for something you can connect to in the work you're doing. Or quitting and looking for different work.



*Amelie Nothomb. And yes, we do.

**Although, some of it may involve physics. How else do you explain wrangling 12 tonnes of books into a space where only 10 tonnes can go?

time warp

It's December seventh! And do you know what that means?

It's time to start getting my act together about what books we're going to order for Black History Month in February!

Yep. We're not even through the chaos that is Christmas in retail and I've realized that if I don't have this list ready to order on January second, we are not getting half of the books I want. Which seems both unfair and insane. I am still using all of my available brain cells to try and squeeze six boxes of Love in the Time of Cholera onto displays!

I could let this go. It's true. But I know that if I do, future me is going to be cussing out past me for weeks on end.

I'm also trying to make notes to myself about what we've carried over from last year, what's working, what's not, and what I think we should do for next Christmas. You know, so that come July, I'm ready.