h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My weidest experiences all involve big UK stars.

One day I was working away in a major high street jewellers in the WEst End of London when I heard this very family voice. I looked up and say this thin Liverpudlian man looking at hte cusotme Jewellery. His name is Paul O'Grady but at the time he appeared almost exclusivly as Lily Savage, and he/she was apearing in a stage version of Prisioner C Block H just up the road at the time.

Another time I came into work and was told to move some of our most expensive wathces out of their normal spot and replace them with the cheap sekonda's. The reason beeing that Screaming Lord Sutch was coming to do launch a major and campaign for that company.


However finally serving Boy George one time I had to stop my self from freaking out when I realised his make-up did not cover his face and neck evenly nad there was a clearly no made up section just under his right ear.

I have some telephony stories as well I must try and remember them.

Working a movie theater concession stand as a teenager, I had to deal with all kinds of people...

Working a Friday night shift with two busy movies (back in ancient days where movie theaters with only 2 screens actually existed) I had a 20ish man come through the line. Reasonably dressed, polite enough, etc. He asked me if we had "Dots", a certain brand of candy. I told him that we did not. He shrugged, ordered a soda and some popcorn, went on into the theater.

I wouldn't have thought of him ever again if he hadn't come back out to the stand about 30 minutes later. This time, he was acting really bizarrely! He wandered around in the lobby for a couple of minutes (hard to do in a small lobby) muttering to himself, then came back over to the counter. As I was the largest & strongest of the girls in the stand, I got elected to deal with him.

He stood and stared at me for a long moment after I asked if I could help him. "Yes." (long pause) "You can." (another long pause) "Do you have any Dots?"

"No sir, as I said earlier, we don't carry Dots."

This time he stared at me long enough to really freak me out. I motioned for one of my coworkers to go try to find the manager.

Finally, he just started looking around, up in the air above his head, and said, "You do too have Dots, they're right here!" and proceeded to make motions like he was picking apples off a tree! When he'd apparantly collected all the Dots he wanted, he thanked me politely, turned and wandered back into the theater, and didn't come back out until the movie was over!

All we could figure was that he'd dropped some sort of hallucinogen, that didn't kick in until his second "trip" to the counter!

We had our share of "Whoop! Whoop!" NUTS.

We had "Kimono Man" who wore a silk lasies kimono, and carried a magnifying glass which he used to examine everything from books to the escalator handrail to other customers. In summer, he magically transformed into "Arthur Man" (as in Arthur the Aardvark kids cartoon). He came in wearing Arthur sunglasses, Arthur windbreaker, Arthur shoelaces, Arthur bakpack and even Arthur hair clips....

There was the disturbed young man who would come into the children's book section and pick a book off the shelk an... ummmm... get happy with himself if he wasn't caught and turfed in time.

"Snuggli Man" wore a heavy ski-jacket in all weather summer and winter and smelled horribly like urine. He did this really slow slow-motion walk and wore a baby-carrier stuffed with newspaper either under or on top of his coat(hence the nickname).

There was "Rat-faced Boy" who looked and acted like a rat. I turfed him when I discovered him viewing child pron on the internet. Later, he was arrested and charged for breaking his parole on child-molestation conviction by downloading at another intenet cafe. He was labelled a "dangerous offender" at that point. I never felt so vindicated after that hit the papers because the manager had given me heck for telling him to "get the F*** out of the store" when I turfed him out before. There was another horrible little man who was also caught repeatedly by me doing the same thing and we finally had to call the police because he kept coming back despite being banned.

There was "Rubber Glove Guy" who was probably the weirdest of all. He had wild tangled red hair, wore a pair of yellow-tinted ski goggles, a trench coat, and a very large pair of bright yellow rubber gloves (washing-up gloves) and would wander about in the children's book section leering at everyone with a frightening grin on his face, until we managed to get someone to turf him.

At the art supply store is "The Heave-Ho Lady" who weighs about 500 lbs and buys a huge pile of art supplies. All, well and good, but she always comes in at 10 minutes before closing and is so slow about choosing what she wants. She heaves her very ample bosom on the counter and sighs heavily, like she is expiring, throughout her visit.... Hence, "The Heave-Ho Lady". Even though she buys hundreds of dollars worth of art supplies every month, she knows nothing about the things she is buying.

She tries to buy oil brushes for watercolor and when you try and explain the difference between oil and watercolor brushes, she looks completely blankly at you and then asks another really stupid question. Or she asks you a question and before you get half a sentence out of your mouth she is off looking at something totally different, then wants to buy stretched canvases for doing watercolor. I took to keeping an eye out for her in the 15 minutes before closing and locking the door if I saw her.

MH said: "Chapters did the same thing. They cut the staff so far back that there were days when there were only two people on the floor and one cashier until mid-morning and in the evenings. They started buying huge amounts of books no one wanted and not providing the ones they DID want."

The thing that Chapters did in the last year or two that made me grumbly was closing earlier. I was one of the customers who would regularly come in between 2200 and 2300 and buy things. Imagine my surprise when I showed up and found the doors locked.

The other was removing the couches and selling candles and similar non-book things. (Sounds like two things, but they both happened at the same time.)

Removing the couches changed the whole book-buying experience and I've noticed that my book-buying patterns changed around the same time. I no longer spend ~$100/month at Chapters.

On the up side, I was happily pleased by the Chapters at South Keys because they put me on the standing order list for RAIL magazine from the UK.

Imagined Gosho, Mudhooks and some of the others in a situation I just saw in a Sushi bar. "Well, yes, it is raw...", "No, not cooked in any way....", "No, it's not marinated....", "Well, yes, it is JUST raw...", "No special preparation, just RAW...", "You can order cooked food here....", "No, the raw fish is just fish that it not cooked in any way..."......... etc. etc.

I had mixed feelings about the couches and reading tables.

When I lived in New York, I used to go to Barnes and Noble which is what Chapters was modelled on (B&N actually had a very small interest in Chapters). At B&N they also have comfy chairs and reading tables. With the exception of seeing huge stacks of magazines piled up at the tables in the Starbuck's there, I never saw the misuse of the priviledge of being able to sit and sample the books the way I did at Chapters.

Either I was not there at the right time, or there was some other reason. Whether it was the presence of burly security, or that B&N made it clear early on that browsing was fine, but spending all day, everyday with your feet on the couches, sleeping on the couches, eating fried chicken (I kid you not!) while reading the books, reading the papers and leaving them torn and stained with coffee and food, or having sex on the couches just wasn't on.

Certainly Chapters didn't. People got used to the idea that just about any type of behaviour was okay. For a while we had security, though I don't know why, because they were undermined by both the complete lack of effort on the part of head office to try and stem shoplifting, and the GM who wouldn't act on even blatant cases of theft or bad behaviour.

Eventually, they got rid of the security and practically handed over the goods to the shoplifters and the bums.

I started adding up the damage to books on a weekly basis and it went into the hundreds in my department, alone. As well, there were times when we had several thousand dollars worth of software stolen weekly. Still, HQ made no effort to put policies in place to reduce both damage or loss.

Certainly, there were plenty of people who sat down, read a book (even cover-to-cover) who did so without wrecking the book and was kind enough to go an put it back on the shelf. The numbers of those people gradually dwindled and they were replaced by people who were just plain pigs.

It got to the point where I had three carts of books to reshelve on the go at all times. If I got the carts emptied, within minutes, I had three more to take their place. More often than not, they were filled with the same tattered and dog-eared copies that I had just reshelved within the previous hour.

When Chapters finally went t!ts up (due in part, no doubt, to large sums lost from damage and loss) and Indigo bought it out, security was brought back in, the chairs were removed, and security was beefed up.

Some time after I left Chapters I was beside myself with glee to have been told that the former GM at the store where I worked, who had been handed the managership at one of the most prestigious stores in the chain (likely because he always had his head up the a$$e$ of the three top guys at head office), got his cumuppance.

I was told that on the day that Indigo took over Chapters, Heather Reismann (sp?), the owner, walked into his store and told him he was fired and had 5 minutes to get out of the store. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

Mudhooks, that was a story to make a girls heart glad, thanks

Must just say that ont he books and sofas front I'm a lurker... In the sense that in Borders, I'll take a pile of books to the cafe, have two of the biggest you can get while I read the backs of the books, then I'll take most of the books to the cash desk, and buy, the others I will replace if I can remember where I got them from

Apologies to any borders employees if this is bad behaviour, I promise to repent

I must say I'm amazed at the bookshops you have. In this country I haven't seen any where you could sit around on couches and read them. And neither the, to me, crazy idea of being able to do it while sipping coffee.

In Malaysia I got quite annoyed at the bookshops. Almost everywhere the books were all wrapped in plastic. So all you had to go on was if the cover looked nice, no chance of actually flipping through it. Especially with a coffee table book, that must be annoying.

Well, in the right circumstances, it is a very civilized way to buy books. Being allowed to sit for a few minutes or an hour reading in order to decide which books you want to buy is great.... However, as illustrated above, it can be a complete disaster.

I remember way back in High School (28 years ago.... ) a boyfriend and I talked of opening a gallery/bookshop/coffee shop. People laughed at us.... I still wish I had been able to do that. There are a couple of shops in town that are very nice and relaxing. Nicholas Hoare books near the National Gallery, here in Ottawa, has a couch and a fireplace. Obviously they don't tolerate the riff-raff abusing the priviledge. It is lovely to sit for half an hour to look through a few books, eventually settling on a few titles to buy....

Well, in the right circumstances, it is a very civilized way to buy books. Being allowed to sit for a few minutes or an hour reading in order to decide which books you want to buy is great.... However, as illustrated above, it can be a complete disaster.

I remember way back in High School (28 years ago, my darlings) a boyfriend and I talked of opening a gallery/bookshop/coffee shop. People laughed at us.... I still wish I had been able to do that. There are a couple of shops in town that are very nice and relaxing. Nicholas Hoare books near the National Gallery, here in Ottawa, has a couch and a fireplace. Obviously they don't tolerate the riff-raff abusing the priviledge. It is lovely to sit for half an hour to look through a few books, eventually settling on a few titles to buy....

Just wanted to say, too.... there is a special place in heaven for people who reshelve their own books (as long as it goes where it came from....). Clerks everywhere thank you.

Just wanted to say, too.... there is a special place in heaven for people who reshelve their own books (as long as it goes where it came from....). Clerks everywhere thank you.

If I can't remember where a book came from, I take it to an assistant and because I have no sense of how my brain cell works. Woring in a shop myself, I know how irritating it is when peopel aregood intentioned, but create double the work for you in the process

*bookmark*

Stop marking all those books

SECURITY!!!!

The question is, what are they marking the books with? As a librarian, I can cope with pencil marks, but highlighter pens...