Human Spirit
I recently came across an uncommon reminder of my past life as a corporate wage-slave working for a very large, very evil chain of bookstores. In the better part of a decade I spent doing that, I learned a lot about the reading tastes of the American public, but also something inexplicable about human spirit.
The thing is, I don’t know if it’s an observation about the inherent cynicism and mistrust in the human spirit, or an observation about the eternal optimism and unquenchable flame of hope that burns brightly in us all. (Smart money, though, is on the former.) It’s this:
People would come in looking for something, and ask me if we had it. More often than not, when the answer was “no”, they wouldn’t believe me. “Really?” they’d ask. “Are you sure?” “Could you double-check?”
It would be one thing if they had reasonable grounds for disbelief; if they were looking for Disney’s Harry Potter and the Bridges of Pokemon County Strike Back, or something like that. (Yeah, that might date me a little bit.) But most of the time, they were looking for things like U.L. Leadbetter’s Meter and Rythm in the Pastafazool Cycle, Vol. III, third revised edition. “Wow, you don’t have that? It’s one of the best analyses of Pastafazoolian rhyming verse ever, and I know it was reprinted just thirty years ago…”
It got to be so bad, I bought a little button that reads “NO means NO”, and wore it pinned on my shirt every day for about two years, before some regional manager came by and informed me it was “too political”. Yeah, really. Anyway, yeah, I found the button the other day.
So… is this extraordinarily annoying behavior a symptom of eternal optimism, a feeling that if you just persevere a little bit, you’ll get what you want, when you want it? Or is it a sign of cynicism, a suggestion that people just automatically expect to be lied to? I couldn’t tell you, but I can say this phenomenon is one of the things I miss least about my life in retail. (The bat colonies in the basement utility tunnels are one of the things I miss most.)
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