Colonial Chinese

When you work in retail you're essentially dealing with the public day in and day out, which means you have to be able to handle pretty much any weirdo that walks in off the street. When you work as a bookseller that's compounded by the fact that you also have to deal with a whole new subspecies of literary weirdo. One of my colleagues once had to deal with a guy who cornered her when she was working alone upstairs towards the end of the day. He wanted to order some books (no problems there, always happy to help, sir) , but he wanted them in a hurry because the aliens were going to take him away to another dimension in a couple of weeks...

 

And then there was the mystery customer who left a (mercifully empty) condom wrapper placed neatly on my till, or the gentleman who grabbed a book from the front of the store, walked through the main hall, up the stairs and right to the back of the shop, only to hand me the book and ask me how much it cost, whereupon I turned the book over, looked at the back cover and told him.

 

What is it with bookshops and oddballs? Don't get me wrong - most of the book-buying public are perfectly polite and reassuringly normal, but there are worrying numbers of people who wander into bookshops after having apparently left their brains or their manners at home (frequently both). Yes, I am standing behind a till. No, that does not mean that I am mentally deficient. Nor does it mean that you can swear at me when I tell you we don't carry books on bestiality, and nor does does it mean that you can let your toddler piss on a stack of books and cause £200 worth of damage because you're upset that we haven't got any customer toilets. Some of the stuff we have to contend with just beggars belief, and there's a reason my employers train their staff on how to avoid conflict and defuse potentially dangerous situations with abusive customers.

 

Sometimes the customers aren't so much abusive as...confused. When I was an eager rookie, I once answered a call from a lady who wanted to know if we had a book about "Colonial Chinese". I dutifully looked through the database for her, but to no avail. She didn't know the exact title or the author or the publisher, but she was adamant that there was a book about "Colonial Chinese" currently available and she wanted it. After about twenty minutes of fruitless searching with the phone glued to my ear, I heard some muffled whispering as she conferred with someone, only to inform me that she was actually after a language book on "Colloquial Chinese"...To top it off, she actually had a copy in the house and just wanted another one. As I battled the red mist that was descending before my eyes, I told her that it would probably be a good idea if she fetched it so that we could have a look at the details...