Today's been a pretty great day for customers. We've been making progress on some projects in the back, selling some action figures that have been in the store longer than there's been a store. Pretty great.
Phone rings. Me: "This is Adam, how may I help you?" Random Caller: "Hi, are you the owner?" Me: "Nope. I'm the manager." RC: "Could you do something about your car?" Me: "Um. I don't have a car." RC: "The Trek Truck." Me: "I don't know what that is." RC: "Every day it's either parked in front of your store or in front of the health food store across the street. I think it's part of your electronics department." Me: "Nope. We don't have any trucks or an electronics department." RC: "Are you sure? I see it there all the time." Me: "It's not us. I don't know whose truck it is." RC: "What are they doing there?" Me: "I don't know." RC: "There's two men in it sometimes. Adult men. Grown men. Do they work for you?" Me: "Nope." RC: "Why are they there, then?" Me: "I don't know. They're not associated with our store in any way." RC: "This is so weird. I need to know who they are." Me: "Ok. Good luck." RC: "Where did they go?" I hang up the phone.
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"Guys, I have a comic that's never been touched, that's worth, like, $200. It's the original Superman comic." says a kid whose future includes congress, lobbyist, Fox News reporter, or whatever job description includes Obvious Fraud.
Anyone who's ever worked in the service industry will tell you that No Matter How Long It's Been Since You've Waited Tables whenever you're really stressed out, you stress dream about waiting tables. Missing orders, people who get up and leave for no reasons, not knowing table numbers, wrong food, coworkers not showing up, etc.
About six months ago, all my stress dreams transitioned into Trying To Order Comics. Usually, they're super brief ten second or so dreams that wake me up. A book won't show up in Diamond. Our POS won't work. I have a pile of special orders and no way to tell who they're for. Tonight's was ... different. A distributor was calling, trying to get me to order more copies of their books. And I was trying to explain to him that nobody had ever bought his books from us, so I couldn't justify ordering more, and he kept suggesting ways I could reach out to people to get them to buy his books. What were his book's names? "Polite Misogyny", "Unintentional Racism", "Traced Porn Faces And Plotholes", "Homophobic Stereotypes By Someone Who Hasn't Yet Realized They're Gay", and a giant hardcover called "This Hasn't Aged Well". I kept handing copies to regular customers who sat down, read the books in their entireties, and asked me questions I couldn't answer because I hadn't read the books. Then they would leave. Without buying anything. Including their massive piles of preordered books. Because they were so put off by the books I had tried to sell them. Can we please reach the stage of the pandemic where the Restaurants In My Dreams can reopen so I can go back to not knowing table numbers? |
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