Chevy Chase on a lawnmower

Today is my first day at my “new” job — an editor at my paper (versus just assistant to the editor, which was my position as of last Friday)! I can already see how much busier I’m going to be as the sole individual in all of my sections without a real back-up plan . . . but I’m looking forward to the challenge. It’ll be a nice change of pace to stay continuously busy during the day!

In further fairly uneventful news, we had a rash of crazed customers at the store over the weekend who never failed to bring the LOLs. I updated the list I now keep in my back pocket of the most hilarious stories.

My favorite is actually not a “bad” customer story: A father was walking around the bookstore with his young son, who has obviously reached that overwhelmingly curious stage of life where he routinely points to objects, asking his dad what everything is. His patient father responded kindly, “Oh, that’s a book” or “That’s a magazine” or “That’s my shoe.” I was standing near the information counter, sorting through some recovery when they walked by a display.

“Dad, what’s that?” asked the little boy, pointing at the first cover of a stack of movies.

His father raised his eyebrows, puffing out his cheeks. “That’s . . . Chevy Chase on a lawnmower.” (I’m assuming he was looking at a film classic, but I couldn’t figure out which one, really.) He laughed a little, then tugged on his bewildered son’s hand. “Come on, buddy,” he laughed.

I burst out chuckling myself and had a hard time holding it together when I rang up his family about ten minutes later. I wanted so bad to mention Chevy Chase, but I didn’t want him to think I was stalking him or something! It was just so ridiculously random — I loved it.

We got into a lot of political confrontations with customers over the weekend, too — people who were upset because we had too many Obama books, others who were upset because we weren’t displaying McCain books, others who felt our displays “unfairly” supported Obama . . . okay, so these are all Obama-haters, I realize now. All political beliefs aside, I don’t know how anyone could look at any of our displays and see them as anything but balanced and fair! There may be more “Obama” books on a table, but that’s because there are more Obama books in existence! And if the agitated customers had actually bothered to, you know, read the covers, they would have seen that most of the books were actually criticisms of Barack Obama.

But I guess no one actually troubles themselves to read anymore.