Shopping in a Bookstore: Lesson #1

I understand there are a lot of perfectly nice folks out there who like visiting and shopping in bookstores but wonder to themselves, "Am I doing this right? What IS the proper way to shop in a bookstore?"

Good news: I have all the answers to all the questions people didn't even know they were asking.

Bad news: Some of these lessons will be difficult to learn. But I'm confident that with time and effort, anyone can become an efficient and effective book shopper loved by bookstore employees everywhere!

Let's start with a big one. My number one cardinal rule of book browsing.

Do. Not. Put. The. Books. Back. Incorrectly.

This is basically the worst thing you can do. Okay, so maybe shoving 10 DVDs in your coat and making a break for the door is worse. And I suppose if you dumped your coffee all over an entire stack of books that would also be worse. But by far the most common offender is the person who puts the book back in the wrong place. Let me explain why this drives us booksellers CRA-zy.

If you come in looking for a book, I am going to look it up in the computer, see what it says we have and where, and then we'll go look for it together. Let's pretend that the computer says yes, we have one copy of Secrets of the Ultimate Husband Hunter (this is an actual title someone asked me for) by Nancy Nichols. Then we're going to head over to Self-Improvement (a treasure trove of ridiculously titled tomes) and make a beeline for the "N"s.


Now this may come as a surprise to some, but in the bookstore, we use something called "alphabetizing" to keep the books in order. What is alphabetizing? Well, it's just a handy little system in which the books are lined up according to the author's last name. So you and I are walking over to the shelf with the "N" authors, headed to get you some help with that wild sport of Husband Hunting, but upon arrival, we find no Nichols between Neighbors and Nim. Little do you know, and little do I know, that last week somebody else picked up that book, carried it around a bit, and then slid it back onto a shelf... in Fantasy. Which is perhaps a good place for a person who looks at the act of entering a relationship as "husband hunting" but that is an argument for another time and place. What matters is, that until someone is organizing the fantasy shelves and realizes that the Ultimate Husband Hunter is in the wrong place, nobody is finding and nobody is buying that book. So now the person who randomly tossed the book back on a shelve has made it so you can't get your book and we can't make a sale. You are frustrated at me for saying it looked like we had a copy (which it did) and I am frustrated because I can't find something our system says we should have (which we do).

What about people who put it back in the general area they found it? If Nancy Nichols, for example, gets put on the shelve right above or below, chances are that in looking in the "N" section we'll probably run across it. Plus we know that happens so we're in the habit of looking in the area before we call it quits. This is the least offensive, but still annoying, way that people put things back wrong.

Bumping it up several notches on the no-no scale is setting the wrong book in front of a face-out. I can hear you protesting: "What kind of crazy bookseller lingo are you using now, Amy?!" It's like this. Despite the old adage "not to judge a book by its cover," we all do it. Covers of books are prettier than spines, and people like looking at them. A "face-out" is when we take all the copies of a certain book on a shelf, and face them cover-out. This is nice to look at, helps us keep large quantities of certain books without taking up as much space, and fills out the full shelf. Example:



So now let's say there isn't one but four copies of Ultimate Husband Hunter and they are faced-out where they are supposed to be on the shelve but someone set another book down, faced out, right in front of them. If it is a random, not even remotely in the section book, we usually figure that one out pretty quickly. But let's say it is another self-help book, or even worse, another "N" author self-help book. You can see how we might easily be fooled by this face-out fake-out. And you can imagine how infuriating it is to realize later that the book you were looking for was right there the whole time.

But you want to be helpful! But you want to do the right thing! Here's the truth. I would rather put your book away for you than not be able to find it because you, even with the best of intentions, put it away wrong. So unless you really and truly know where your book goes, just bring it to someone who works there. Leave it on the info desk. Bring it up to the register and say you don't want it.

One exception to the don't-put-it-back-yourself rule: If you get a large stack of books from the same very small, very specialized section, put them back yourself. I'm serious. Do not pull out fifteen books on birdwatching and then leave them in a pile by the chairs in religion. You probably picked up every birdwatching book we have and you totally know where they go. Put them back or at least have the courtesy to bring them to the info desk and look apologetic about it. Did you pull out six books on Oracle SQL Programming? If you're smart enough to know what the heck that is, you're smart enough to put those books back where you found them. Leaving giant stacks of books by, in, and near the browsing chairs is super annoying. But we're veering into lesson two, to be continued at another time.

I hope you've enjoyed lesson one of shopping in a bookstore! Stay tuned for upcoming lessons, including:

• how to ask for help
• why we can't find "that one book about that guy" without more information
• my children's section is not a drop-off zone,
• why are books so expensive,
• why you can't return without a receipt
• stealing is a no-no,
• and so much more!

Sports Ramblings: Draft Day

If you've ever read this blog before, you know how I love sports. But on a 1 to 10 interest level scale, with 1 being golf and 11 being baseball, professional football only ranks about a 5. I do take a particular interest in certain players, and there was a time when being a St. Louis Rams' fan was pretty darn exciting. Like in 1999.

Once we moved to Nashville, I really felt out of the NFL loop, although in the past couple years I've felt moderately more interested in the Titans. But overall, pro football isn't really my thing.

College football, however, I love. Being a Sooner fan is always pretty sweet. My happiest time of the year is those few weeks in the fall where the end of baseball season overlaps with the start of NCAA football. All this to say that my affection for college football makes me slightly more interested in the most ridiculous part of NFL football: the draft.

It's a total circus, this year being blown up into a three day primetime event. But I am interested, at least for the first couple rounds, because some of the most interesting and talented players of the last four years of college football will be on the board. While I'm especially invested in seeing where the Sooners land, I think EVERYONE is at least a little curious as to what will happen to Tim Tebow. I also want to see Texas' Colt McCoy taken in the first round. I think he's probably the most underrated of the many big name quarterbacks in this draft. And who will pick Jimmy Clausen, the little guy from Notre Dame? And what about all those other position players that no one really cares about? C'mon, it's true!

But back to the Sooners... or in reference to the draft I suppose I should say THE Sooner that's on everyone's mind. Will Sam Bradford be the number one pick by the Rams? (This is the advantage of having your NFL team totally suck; they get first dibs next time around.) Having released Mark Bulger last month, they certainly seem primed to pick a quarterback of some kind. As one of many increasingly disinterested Rams fans, I can certainly see the appeal of a big name "franchise" quarterback pick. I don't really know enough about the NFL to know if it is a good decision otherwise. Of course, as a Sam Bradford fan, I'd love it if I could cheer for him AND the Rams at the same time. Especially if they started to actually be, you know, good.

And now, just because he's awesome, a picture of Sam Bradford:


Bonus shout out: to Nebraska's Ndamukong Suh, for having the most fun name in the draft pool by FAR.

Remembering

Fifteen years ago today, Oklahoma City experienced the worst attack of domestic terrorism in this country's history. The bomb tore through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building right in the heart of downtown, killing 168 people. This included 19 children in the building's daycare center.

I was in middle school at the time, and we had just moved from OKC to St. Louis two years earlier. I remember when my mom picked me up from school that day and explained to me what had happened. She let me watch the television coverage when we got home. It was surreal; my dad pointed out the building just two buildings over, which held the offices where he had worked for Southwestern Bell. All the windows were blown in. Watching the burning wreckage, and hearing the heroic stories of rescue, I still felt like an Okie. I always do on this day.

Someday I hope to visit the beautiful memorial that was erected where the building once stood. There's an eighty-year-old elm that somehow managed to withstand the blast, called the Survivor Tree. You can read about it here.

I hope you'll join me in remembering this event and honoring the survivors, and all the people of Oklahoma City, who refused to let tragedy and despair define their future.

A Haiku

Bangs: I'm not sure why
I get them cut each time then
Pin them back daily.

Laundry.

I have most of this day off, just working an evening shift from 5-9:30. This means I have a nice, uninterrupted span of time in which I should be getting lots of housework done. And yet, it's 10:45 and so far my only accomplishment is taking a shower. A good accomplishment, to be sure, but my day hasn't been booming with productivity.

The main thing I need to do is laundry. This is good: I love laundry. It's my favorite chore. I love sorting things into piles, which is the first step of laundry. Without kids and with a husband who has an "indoor" job, most of our laundry isn't that dirty or smelly, so nothing to bother me in the washing step. I love everything about the dryer phase, especially how everything comes out in a big warm Bounce-smelling pile. I like to sit on the couch and sort and fold while I watch TV. I love laundry.

But.

The trouble with laundry is that it leads to two of my least favorite activities: ironing and putting things away. I don't mind ironing in theory, but my ironing board is a drop down from my bathroom door, so I have to stand in the bathroom to do this chore. Also pretty much the only clothes I get to iron are Ben's long-sleeved button down shirts, aka the least fun things to iron. After 5 years of it I'm still not entirely sure how I'm supposed to iron the sleeves. Mostly I just try to avoid this step and sometimes that means Ben looks a little wrinkly. Good thing he works in the music business where that is encouraged. So ironing, not that fun.

The least fun part of laundry, however, is that after all the fun of washing and drying and folding, I'm supposed to get up and put all these clothes away. I might not dislike this step as much if we had more closet and dresser space. But since we're tight on both those things, I dread the process of finding hangers, hanging things up, trying to shove the hanger onto the already jam-packed rack in a way that doesn't knock anything else off, and so on. Same goes for folded clothes in drawers. I'm not sure how, but no matter how much laundry I do, when I go to put it away, the drawers are already full. This has led me to the very bad habit of just sitting the piles of clean clothes on top of my dresser, or more accurately, on top of other piles of clean clothes on top of my dresser. Hang-up clothes get draped in a hopefully non-wrinkling way over a pile of other hang-up clothes over the suitcase I haven't fully unpacked from New Zealand. Okay, now I've revealed too much.

What are your favorite and least favorite chores?

My Apologies

I have to apologize to you fine people for a couple things. First, it has been way too long since I blogged. Every time I sat down to write something I either a) realized I was late for work or b) found I didn't really have anything to say. Both of those things are still true right now, but I am sorry anyway! I did post an awesome video that they played at church on Easter, but that's kind of a cheat way to blog.

My second apology is that for a long, long time, my blog has been seriously ugly. Plain and boring. However, despite what people might think due to my fondness for online social media, I'm not really all that technologically savvy. I don't really know how to make my blog look awesome, and I don't even know if Blogger is the best blogging platform to be using. Still, no excuse for a fugly old blog that even I don't like looking at. So I'm trying a downloaded template that I kind of liked. We'll see if it makes the cut after a few days. If you like/dislike it or have any other suggestions I'm happy to hear them!

I hope everyone had an awesome, blessed Easter and I promise to try to do more regular blogging in the future. I do have an inspiring topic, as BASEBALL starts again today!!! Wooo!!!

Do You Know Him?