Other creatures of the night

My two favorite customers from my Monday night shift at the l.n.c.b.:

The woman who brought the following books to the register: a book about loneliness; a book about how to survive a breakup; a book about shyness; and some other self-help book I can't remember. She was cute, too. It's amazing how much you can infer (or wrongly assume) about someone based on their purchases -- which is why we should never let the feds get access to library records.

And then there was the man who wanted books on "the culture and geography of Mississippi." The l.n.c.b. doesn't have a geography section, and we're not very good on searches by subject, but I looked up "Mississippi" on the computer, and all I found were books whose titles indicated they were either about slavery or the Civil Rights movement -- titles like Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy or Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter . No, I don't want that, he said -- I want something on the culture. Well, what the hell is the culture of Mississippi besides slavery and the Civil Rights movement? I really didn't know what to tell him, and just led him to the U.S. History section and left him there. At least an hour later he came up to the register, just as the store was closing, with a state map and a book -- I don't remember what it was, unfortunately, but it seemed vaguely about the culture of the South.

Of course, I could have told him to go read the novels of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. But I have a confession to make. I haven't read either author.

Last week I pissed off a customer without even meaning to. These students from Cal park themselves in the l.n.c.b.'s cafe for hours to study -- I suppose because they live in shared apartments and have noplace else to go. At the end of the day last Wednesday we were closing and every customer had left but this one guy who was scribbling away, showing no sign of moving. I was in the cafe picking up the piles of books and magazines that people leave in the cafe all day long without buying; I may have been a little irritated at that habit of the customers when I walked by him and said "Time to pack it in, pal." He muttered something, packed up his things and left. I later heard that he got so pissed off that he called the manager on the phone an hour later and tore her a new asshole. I felt bad that she had to catch shit for something I'd done. But talk about over-reacting.