Accepting the things I can’t change, or making the horse drink, or adventures in customer service and not taking things personally

Work pro­ceeds, apace even.  Math­e­mat­i­cal magic and alpha­betic abil­i­ties and the shock­ing abil­ity to lis­ten to NPR and read the NYT Book review have led me to be praised, per­haps even unduly.  I guess it’s a sur­prise to find some­one lit­er­ate work­ing in a book­store, not that we don’t have peo­ple like that work­ing with me– it’s just … a big store, and every­one has their gen­res, and I hap­pened to have read all the Greek come­dies and tragedies for a class I took in col­lege.  (What?  My Dad was a clas­sics geek who thought I should read all of Aeschy­lus and Euripi­des and Sopho­cles and Aristo­phanes, and it was bet­ter than read­ing Mil­ton and Dante again. AP Eng­lish and Human­i­ties at our HS were truly AP.)

The past two days were a book­ended les­son in “cus­tomer ser­vice,” if that’s what you call it.  I tend to think of it as more of an ongo­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal study– but then, I would, I’m nerdy like that and need to jus­tify the way I over­think things.

So any­way.  On to the story.

We keep the spe­cial orders and reser­va­tions and call-to-holds and all of that ilk behind the reg­is­ter– over time, things get purged, since the books are marked with an order sheet and a “hold until” date.  The things that our store doesn’t nor­mally carry (we’re smaller than aver­age, no music or DVDs and we pre­date the super­store model, so yeah, I work in a book­store that sells mostly books, how wacky is that?) go back to the pub­lisher or the cor­po­rate warehouse(s), and the things we do stock get put on the shelves– then the com­puter record of the order gets can­celed out, and it’s like it never existed unless you’ve got ten min­utes to dig into order his­to­ries after chas­ing too many screens and click-throughs.  There’s a war­ren of shelves in the base­ment for returns, although the obscure aca­d­e­mic presses get a big scary box that gets shoved under a table.

Cue the cus­tomer who came in Thurs­day– heavy and pale and red-eyed and look­ing Unhappy with a Very Cap­i­tal U.  She wanted her book and it just wasn’t there.  Said she’d spe­cial ordered it, and yes, she had to have, because it was a divinity-school level text­book and noth­ing we’d carry in nor­mal course.  It wasn’t in the return cart that still hadn’t gone down, it wasn’t on the order shelves, it wasn’t in the “wait” area– it was just nowhere.  She got increas­ingly upset even as I explained where we would look next, irate and prac­ti­cally cry­ing because she was hand­i­capped and had to use the Ride (long story short, it’s a pain in the ass, almost unus­able van ser­vice for the hand­i­capped run by the MBTA through incom­pe­tent sub­con­trac­tors) and she’d had to pay money to come here and it was com­ing back in twenty min­utes and … and … and .…  She said she’d called and asked for it to be held past the expiry period, but the damned thing was … nowhere.  We finally found it in the Aca­d­e­mic Press Return Box of Doom, after enlist­ing three peo­ple to search all over the store, then got it to her and got her a cof­fee to drink while she waited for the Ride to return.

Not one “thank you,” not one acknowl­edg­ment that we’d busted our humps, blah blah blah blah.  She was incon­so­late and angry, no doubt from what­ever her dis­abil­ity was (she looked not just depressed but in pain) and noth­ing we did was going to make her happy ever again.  (I found out, because I brought it up at the AM pre-opening meet­ing yes­ter­day, that she had in fact called and some­one for­got to bring the note down to the desk from the info desk upstairs.)  I’d be upset, too, but … well, it was a reminder that some peo­ple sim­ply can­not be any­thing besides unhappy, whether they’re crazy or not.  I felt badly about the fact that the book had been mis­tak­enly purged, but I was peeved, under­neath, that there was no acknowl­edg­ment that we were try­ing our asses off to fix things for her.

Yes­ter­day was a dif­fer­ent mat­ter.  We’ve got a lot of repeat cus­tomers who come in a few times a week– some crazy, some retired, some sim­ply bib­lio­philes, some all three and more.  I answered some ques­tions from a repeater, retiree, maybe a lit­tle bit crazy in an OCD, talks to every­one kind of way, let him look at one of the Mondo-Expensive med­ical books we keep behind the reg­is­ter, pointed out where some­thing was in the store, and in between cus­tomers made small talk, which he seemed to need– and he was cog­nizant that he was tak­ing my time and always went off to do some­thing else while I was check­ing peo­ple out.  I had other stuff to do, but the guy’s in all the time (even in my two and a half weeks work­ing there) and he’s nice enough, even if he’s a bit wacky.  He bought some books, I tal­lied them up and took his money, and then he wan­dered the store again while I dealt with some cus­tomers, check­outs, and a few smaller cus­tomer service-type tan­gles– then he came back with more books and I tal­lied them up for him and again checked him out.

“Do they care if you’re doing a good job?” he asked, after I put the new books in his old bag.

“Oh, I think that they like to hear things like that,” I answered.  So he asked me to write down my name and our store num­ber and said he was going to send in an email through the web­site, etc.

There wasn’t more to do than say thank you and that it was kind of him and I’d see him again soon, I was sure, but it was a con­trast and a reminder at once to the expe­ri­ence we’d all had the day before.  I mean– I didn’t do any­thing except make a bit of small talk and bring out the Harrison’s from behind the desk for him to page through.

So, psy­choso­cial les­son for the week:  the only thing we can do is try to be patient and polite– even kind, if we can swing it.  Peo­ple will either accept it or not, and there’s not much you can do about that except try to keep your tem­per in check, because their pre­dis­po­si­tions have noth­ing to do with you and you’re bang­ing your head on the wall past a cer­tain point.  Also– lit­tle things count.  You never know when small talk about Jerome Groopman’s most recent book will make a dif­fer­ence to some lonely person.

God.  I hope all these blog­gish reflec­tions don’t end up sound­ing so trite.  But … there it is.  Sto­ries about this creepy-stalkery hol­i­day item we’re sup­posed to be push­ing to come.