'Tis the Season: It could be worse

Oddly enough, holiday season this year has had fewer incidents of customer craziness (at least for me, I have plenty to complain about when it comes to employees).

I've had a customer ask me what exit you take to get to Cedar Rapids from Iowa City. [There's no exit.  You get on I-80 and follow the signs for I-380 Northbound...it goes straight through the center of Cedar Rapids.]

I spent a good twenty minutes with a grandma who had absolutely zero idea what her grandchildren like at all.  The list she got from her daughter wasn't very informative, either, being full of errors and conflations.  I suggested gift cards; grandma decided to call her daughter again. [I still stand by the gift card idea.]

I had a customer ask me if all the millions of ebooks come preloaded on the e-reader. [Er, no.  I don't even want to think about how many gigabytes that would be.]

Another bookseller told me he had a customer who insisted the e-reader "made it's own Internet." [He swears he's not making that up.]

Someone asked if we sold paint...as in the kind you put on the wall. [Lowe's is across the highway.]

A coworker observed that Tuesday was "Little Old Lady with Very Long List" day - she said the LOLs always keep their VLLs on an old steno pad in their purse.  Next to the Kleenex.

I also had a very (very) bashful little boy who wanted to thank me for hosting his school's bookfair. [I personally didn't host it the store did, but he was so darn cute and shy.]

Once again, student fun!

• I was asked if we had a "quiet study room".  She didn't seem to understand the sentence "No, we do not have a study area, we are a bookstore not a library." [I hear all three public libraries and all the University branch libraries have very lovely study carrells/rooms...I've made use of them from time to time.]
• I keep getting the "But my paper is due tomorrow! Why don't you have my book??" line. [Nope, still don't care about your lack of time-management skills.]
• Some idiot actually told me he doesn't like to go to the library and wanted to know what his options were for getting access to a rather expensive, and what seemed like, academic book. [I really wanted to say "Well, I guess you're shit-outta-luck" but I didn't since I was working.  What I really did was hop on the UI libraries site, pull up the catalog, and find the book he wanted...which is on reserve as a book for his course.  I suggested he start by making use of the reserve copy at the library.  I don't think that was the answer he was looking for.]

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