Blogger ate my life: The 50th entry returns and author sightings abound

Edited to Add: This was my fiftieth entry posted on Friday, December 2nd, and then Blogger ate it. Chewed it up into tiny little pieces. I apologize for the now out of order position, Blogger won’t let me edit or move anything either.

It’s my fiftieth entry!

I wanted to do something all special and hallmark-y, but I’m in the middle of editing my paper and my creative coolness left me sometime last night around the fourth book related nightmare.

“How can one have a book related nightmare?” you ask.

Oh so easily.

• Spend two days locked in a backroom sorting through a huge delayed (thanks to the holiday) shipment of books and trying to figure out what needs to go directly out on the sales floor, what needs to go into its appropriate bin to eventually go out on the sales floor, what needs to be sorted into another box (labeled by genre) to not be looked at again until after Christmas, and what needs to be stripped immediately and thrown away (because I don’t need six copies each of an author’s entire backlist from 2003, especially when they are not even popular in my store. I’m sorry. I just don’t).


• Add to that several rounds of Returns because the warehouse feels the insane need to send me hardcover editions of books that have already transitioned to paperback months ago and enough sound-making books to register the store as a noise pollution zone.


• Throw in a dash of ouch-I-didn’t-know-my-muscles-could-ache-like-that from hauling said sorted boxes and returns to their appropriate homes.


• Mix well with one beer and a cup of exhaustion.


• Layer into a bed that hasn’t been made in a week.

And Ta-daaaaah, you have dreams about sorting books into boxes only to discover it’s the same damn book, and no one needs eight million copies of John Grisham’s The Testament (really, they don’t), so you have to unpack and start stripping them only to realize that the garbage pile on the cart is too tall to make it out the door and...

(insert scream here followed by tossing and turning and some mumbling)

Rinse and repeat at hour long intervals for the entire night.

Bleh.

But enough about me, let’s talk about the author I titled this entry about. He’s much more interesting (and has far fewer paper cuts).

A couple of days ago (during one of my brief sojourns from the backroom) I was helping a customer when I glimpsed a guy at the Nonfiction New Release table. Nothing too spectacular about that, there are many guys that hang out around that table at any given time, but this guy was wearing a scarf commemorating the cheering section of a local sports team. Not only was I a fan of this local team, but the guy looked kind of familiar. Admittedly I do not go to the games to stare at other fans, I’m all about the cute guys on the field, but something about this guy tugged at my mind.

I continued to ring up customers, watching mystery guy out of the corner of my eye, when it finally hit me. He’s an author! That’s right. He wrote a biography about some famous guy who got around with a lot of famous actresses, was a bodyguard to a prince, and was rumored to have a penis with the same girth as a baseball bat (the top part, not the bottom). Everyone seemed real interested in that penis fact, I remembered.

But then I started to doubt myself. Maybe he’s not the author of the book. Maybe he’s just a friend of the author. Being not so good at remembering faces, it was entirely possible that I’d gotten them mixed up. Besides he was standing around the New Release table when the book had been out since September. If he was the author why hadn’t he come in then?

Still, I was sixty percent sure that this was the guy, but I didn’t want to be an idiot and walk up only to find out it wasn’t. This needed more investigation. I watched him (while still ringing customers, people were very free with their money that day) journey from the table, saunter down the power aisle, and turn…Yes, yes, I was right! He turned down the biography aisle. Any minute he was going to come up with his book and ask if he could sign it. Score one for my powers of observation!

It should be noted that a customer actually remarked at this point that I looked absurdly happy. It’s the little things in life really.

Only he did not appear at the counter with the books. The next thing I know, possible author guy is up at the front of the store looking at the trade table.

Oh no, did we not have his books? Were they not out?

Much mental cussing ensued.

I had to know before he left the store, so I called a coworker up from her Manga heaven and made her help the customers so that I could check the biography section. The biography section, by the way, is alphabetized by the subject of the book, not the author. I could not remember the subject’s name at all. Thankfully the author (for he was indeed the author) decided to help me out by pulling his book out (it had been spined in the section as had everything else because the bio section is packed) and facing it forward over some other books. I flipped to the author’s photo to confirm the author’s identity (‘twas he), and started towards the front of the store. He hadn’t signed the books (I’ve started checking after hearing that some authors secretly sign their books in section), hadn’t done anything except flip one out, and I was confused.

Should I just approach him, and ask him to sign the copies, sighting my knowledge of our local sports craziness as why I recognized him? Should I strike up a convo about the sports team and segue into a “Hey aren’t you…” from there?

While the book hadn’t been a NY Times bestseller, it had gotten a damn good review from PW and I’d heard that the production rights had been optioned by a Hollywood studio, so why the hell hadn’t he signed his books!

Before I could get any answers to my bafflement (and get my books signed), the coworker called me up to the counter to help as she was being overrun by customers. The elusive author slipped away.

So there you go. That’s all I’ve got. For my fiftieth entry you get book nightmares and almost signings, and I get to go back to editing my paper. Fill free to share any thoughts on why my author didn’t sign or your own book nightmares, I’m sure they’ll be much more interesting than mine.

Random Sightings Of The Possibly Famous (Part Two), or Oh My God Is That Clay Aiken?

Okay, I don't know what's going on, but this is getting weird. Within a month's time, I've had Robert Plant, Famous Basketball Player Guy (no, I still haven't figured out his name yet), and now Clay Aiken walk into my store.

To the shame of some of my coworkers I was more excited by the first two.

Still I want to know why all these random famous people are coming to my mall, let alone any mall, because malls suck people. Suck like a ten dollar hooker. Perhaps I might be a bit too close to be objective and all, having worked in a mall for the last six years, but I would like to think that I've not been unjustly colored by my experiences. I work in a really high class mall, comparatively speaking, and it has a lot to offer (clothes, reasonably okay mall food, nice jewelry, etc), but I still wouldn't go there if I was famous.

Or infamous.

Or famous because I almost won a reality TV show and bear a strong resemblance to what would happen if Barry Manalow mated with an elf.

Proving once again that I'm totally oblivious (not to mention reinforcing my belief that I've escaped the reality television trend unscathed), it was my coworker who first pointed him out by saying, "Hey, that guy looks like Clay Aiken."

I nodded, went about my business, and even asked him if he needed help finding anything (he didn't and neither did his body guard who looked tweaked out that I would even ask him if he needed help. Hey, Mr. Hired Muscle! People in my state are nice for no apparent reason, deal with it!) . He continued to wonder around my store and passed my second coworker who looked at me all wide eyed and whispered, "Oh my God! That's Clay Aiken!"

She immediately slapped her hand over her mouth. Apparently she hadn't meant to say that out loud...when he was only four feet from her.

Me being me, I still wasn't sure, so I pulled the same staring thing on him that I did with the basketball player. Luckily, Aiken paid with a credit card, 'cause trusting my memory...yeah, not the way to go.

Good news Aiken fans, he looks much better in person. Less elf like. Of course the only picture I'm real familiar with of him was his book cover, which was probably airbrushed.

It made me laugh every time I had to display it up front. It was probably a good thing that I'd forgotten he'd even written a book until after he left. I'm not sure I could have kept from giggling, not to mention I'm not sure that we have it in stock anymore.

And that would have been embarrassing. "Here Mr. Aiken, please sign our stock of your book," she pauses to check the computer, "which we don't have in stock at all."

Oops. That would have gone over real well.

Considering that he's been my third famous person in a month though, and my mother has pounded into my head the superstition of threes over the years, I'm choosing to believe we'll be famous person free again for a long while.

It'll be nice not having to figure out why someone looks familiar, or feel out of the loop when I don't recognize them at all.

Random Sighting of the Possibly Famous

So the other day as I’m doing my rounds to ask people if they need any help, I approached this gentleman at the magazine rack and something about him made me pause. It wasn’t because he was tall (although he was so very tall, which made me feel short—something not that easy to do), or good looking, but how he carried himself. He was just minding his own business, flipping through the car magazines, doing absolutely nothing showy, but I was struck with the thought, “I should know this guy.”

Now considering I have the worst memory for faces ever, and that I’m much more likely to remember someone because of their reading material, this was an odd thought on its own. Not that I think that he’d ever been in my store before. He hadn’t (I’m positive). So that left only one possibility: I’d seen him on TV.

Which must mean he’s famous, right? Yes, that’s how my mind works: TV = Famous (even if it’s the news at 11). I am a child of the eighties.

Still, I had no idea who he was, and rather than sound like an idiot by blurting something out, I just asked him if I could help him find anything. He said, “No, thank you.”

Ah, hah! So he had manners! A clue! Of course, that didn’t mean anything, but combined with the fact that he was wearing Nike gear worth more than I make in a month and was caring a wadded up practice jersey in a bag, I was convinced that I had a Famous Basketball Player in my store.

Ten or twelve years ago, this would have sent me into fangirl heaven. In those days basketball, not to mention my professional basketball team, was a sport worthy of support, and I knew all the rules. I might not have known the faces real well, of always had a problem with that, but I could call a game better than most refs. It was a bonding experience for my dad and I to sit there at a game, eating peanuts and hotdogs, drinking coke, and cheering for our team.

Staring at this customer I suddenly felt nostalgic for the game, the way it used to before my team traded all the good players (or they retired) and put together the group that made them the national joke they have now (or did last year at least, I hear they traded off half bad players after last season). I wanted to call my dad and say, “Let’s go to a game.” I wanted peanuts.

I wanted confirmation that this guy was, indeed, a basketball player because let’s face facts tall does not always equal professional ball player. It was entirely possible that he was just a guy who played a little practice ball and really, really loved Nike, or that I was over-estimating the worth of his entire ensemble. Employees from Nike come into my store all the time, he could have just worked there to score that much brand wear.

If you haven’t guessed, I was staring the whole time. I was trying not to. I went about my business, helped customers, rang people up, but my eyes kept going back to this guy. Was he or wasn’t he? He really did look familiar, but I could have been fooling myself. He could have had “one of those faces.”

Besides, he’d said thank you, which meant that he had manners, so he obviously wasn’t on my town’s team if he was, indeed, a basketball player.

And the logic circled around again, slowly making me crazy.

He finally approached the counter with his magazines, and I thought, finally, finally I’ll just look him right in the face and it will turn out that I sell stuff to his brother all the time.

Yes, I was still staring in that way that said I thought I knew who he was. I couldn’t help myself. I know it was rude, but I had to know!

And that’s when he did it. No, the it was not when he pulled out that Louis Vuitton wallet, although it was a great indicator that he had a liking for the finer things. He started staring back at me like he thought that I thought I knew he was, and that I should know who he was. There we were, locked in eye contact: me trying to figure out where the hell I’d seen him before, and him grinning a little like he was enjoying the hell out of this. I wasn’t going to break and admit defeat, oh no, I was going to get sneaky. Lowering my eyes to his purchases, I rang him up quickly, bagged the magazines and then told announced his total.

Ha, ha, sucker, I thought, pay with a credit card and I will have my answers.

Apparently not only was he polite (he thanked me again after the transaction), if a grinning fool, he also possessed some intellect.

He paid with cash.

I seriously thought he was going to start laughing at my complete disappointment when he handed over the bills. I know that I’m one of those people whose face show’s everything, and I stared at those dollars for a few seconds unable to process that they weren’t what I expected.

Where was the credit card? Rich people don’t carry cash!!! (Unless you are Brittney Spears and you’re bouncing checks).

Like I know that many rich people.

To his credit, he waited very patiently while I dealt with my disappointment, thanked me again, and then left…still grinning.

As he should. You may have won this time, Mr. Basketball Man, but next time, next time I will be more educated. I won’t say anything, but I will know.

I just have to remember to start reading Sports Illustrated again on my lunch break.