Bad day

End of a long day at the l.n.c.b.. My usual Saturday shift -- 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. -- felt longer and more tiring than usual. I spent most of the time at the registers ("at reg"), as usual, dealing with the usual Saturday waves of shoppers. One moment there would be no one in line; three minutes later there would be seven people in line, waiting to check out. We have new cash registers at half the stations, and these are both quieter and quicker, so everyone gravitates to them. When I came over and filled in on reg. no. 5, one of the old ones, during a break, the grating sound of the printer hitting the register tape and the motion (now uncessary on the new registers) of actually tearing the receipt off for the customer already seemed strange.

All day long things felt a little off. My friend the boss took 25 minutes to work through a complicated return-recharge transaction with a woman who had bought scads of blank journals for her fifth-grade students; I did a few returns, but luckily they were all easy ones. The strangest one was when a slender woman wanted to return a book about vegetable juice she had bought at a branch of the l.n.c.b. in upstate New York, and it was sticky, as if it actually had vegetable juice on it. Oh, and the funny thing that happened was when a young couple came in with these two books: a do-it-yourself divorce guide, and a bartender's guide. Nyuck nyuck.

Nevertheless, all day I had a foreboding that something would happen, a robbery or something. And I felt worn down and tired. My last two hours I was scheduled on reshelving, a task I welcomed since the store has been in such lousy shape for the last few weeks. While people have been on vacations, the place has never gotten completely put together at the end of the day, a fact I find depressing -- it makes the whole experience of working there somewhat Sisyphean. I put away, in several sections, books that had been left about the store yesterday and today: novels, business books, history books, books that go in the "General Metaphysics" section (where all the weird-ass New Age stuff goes, that is, if it doesn't go in the "Magic" or "Speculation" sections).

Fifteen minutes before the end of my shift, I got a page and went to spell the guy in the music dept. while he took a break. I hung out there, standing in front of the fan, answering the phone, which no one else seemed to be answering. Finally at 7:02 the guy who belonged in music came back and said, "Wow, you're really removed from all the excitement back here." I said yeah I guess so. "No, did you hear what happened?" he asked. "R_____ was working in the cafe when an old boyfriend came in and came around the counter and threw hot coffee in her face. They're calling the ambulance right now. You really didn't hear anything?"