"Sorry don't fry the chickens"

Is it a full moon? I’ll have to check.

Last night I had to work at my part time gig – I’m a bookseller for the local branch of the “nation’s largest retail book chain”. Three guesses who that may be. It’s an okay job – I don’t work too many hours a week, but it’s enough to give me a little bit of pocket money, and the employee discount is pretty sweet. So technically I get paid, but it’s more like I’m reinvesting in the company.

I like the store and the people I work with, so I won’t pick on “Rhymes with Larnes and Goble” per se; instead, I’ll tell snark about some of the people we deal with on a daily basis.

First, let it be known that most book store customers are perfectly normal, happy, polite (usually), socially well-adjusted citizens. But some of the people who come through our doors? Let’s just say that I’m surprised their allowed outdoors unsupervised. We have acres of stories there, but this trio all came to see us last night:

1 – Mr. Backpack: Mr. Backpack comes in a few times a week. He loiters, but never buys. (We actually get lots of those, but for the most part, they’re harmless. Just don’t make a huge mess, and we’ll get along fine.) Mr. Backpack wears a dirty 70’s t-shirt (usually with Mr. Spock, Farrah Fawcett, or the General Lee ironed on it), and a huge backpack over his shoulders. I swear, if his backpack was any larger it’d look like he could survive in the desert for a month with what he could cram in there. Yet he isn’t homeless; he just dresses that way.

Anyway, Mr. Backpack’s shtick is to tell everyone – booksellers, café workers, customers – that he too is a writer. In fact, he’s written about 70 books so far, and is working on at least 5 or 6 right now. He’s also a writing professor, and is currently selecting a select number of protégés to attend his exclusive writing seminars. Of course, he doesn’t look like he can hold a pen, much less type, but hey – all you have to do is write the words, and anyone can call themselves a “writer”. Hell, I do.

2 – I was at the customer service desk and an older woman – probably late 80’s or early 90’s came up to me. “Excuse me,” she smiled and said gingerly, “I understand you carry Easy Rider magazine.” And she was dead serious about it. So okay – everybody has their own thing – I’m just not used to nice old grandmothers asking for biker magazines. (Give an all-new twist to the phrase “Old Lady”, doesn’t it?) She was thrilled when I handed it to her. “I’m sending it to my OLDER SISTER”, she said. “She lives in Florida, and can’t get it in her complex.”

3 – We have 65,000 different book titles in the store at any given time, and we have a database where we can order you copies of up to another million titles, but customers sometimes expect us to pull out of print books out of the air anytime they demand. See, books have an expiration date – just like milk, meat, and Pauly Shore’s career. If they don’t sell, we don’t keep them around, and publishers don’t make any more. Oh, sure – there are a few popular authors you’ll always find in bookstores – your Kings, your Pattersons, your Nora Roberts – but you aren’t likely to find Mr. Backpack’s tome from 1981 on our shelves, even if he did manage to sell 500 copies to his mother way back when.
So again I’m at the customer service desk, helping an older guy with a book on bison he saw in an old magazine. On the plus side, at least he knew the title and author – sometimes customers will ask for “the book that was on the front table around Christmas, with the green cover and a picture of a guy doing something. You know the one.” Uhhh, no. But anyway, this guy wanted his bison book. Well, I found it in the system, and sure enough – it wasn’t available to us any longer. This usually means that it’s out of print, but it could also be that the publisher is small, and doesn’t have thousands of copies to distribute to every large chain store around the country.

So I told Old Coot that his book was no longer available, and he had a conniption. “Why not?” he yelled. “I just saw it in a magazine this weekend!” I didn’t ask him how old the mag was; it just wasn’t worth going there. (The book was published originally in 1979.) I suggested he try a used book dealer or maybe go online (the blank stare he gave me back told me that his house wasn’t wired for that new-fangled Internet doohickey), but that didn’t work.

So I smiled, held my tongue, and said sorry. And his reply is what makes this Old Coot so memorable:

“Sorry doesn’t fry the chicken, now does it?”

Huh? What the hell does that mean? I give up.

So I’m back to the store today – we’ll see who and what comes through the doors this afternoon. Hopefully they won’t come in looking for fried chicken – although I’ll be glad to direct you to the cookbooks if you’d like.

P.S. It’s not a full moon – I just checked. Swell; that just means the regular weirdoes are a couple of weeks off...