Full Circle

...as in I've come (full circle) in that I've started a part time job at a well known bookstore as a "customer experience representative' or CER as they like to refer to us over the page system - CER to cash please, CER to cash" - which translates into - can someone on the floor please come to the cash desk before the cashier assassinates the customer holding up the queue with all the annoying questions.

When I was 15 I got my first job (a Saturday job - they were all the rage in London if you were still at school) at a bookshop too - though in those days they called it what it was - a sales assistant.  If you were lucky you got some customer service.  I mean the doors are open, the books are on the shelves what more do you want?

I loved it truth be told not least because I'm a book geek but also because there was no such thing as corporate culture in those days so it was total anarchy.  We made displays up, created whichever atmosphere we felt in the mood for and you were lucky to get served at all.  Not so today.  Corporate culture is coordinated at national level today; it's a big money industry - hell I used to get paid handsomely to help create cultures for brands.  Brands!  that's what you got if you touched an iron while it was still on but today a brand has to align to a culture and  a customer promise.

Back in the day if we fancied a Manga - Erotic window display, we would bloody well have one.  Death metal playing in the background and porn strewn across the floor.  If you wanted to read a book you flipping well bought it - none of this sitting on comfy leather couches, freely leafing through pages whilst sipping coffee malarkey.

I still remember a memo in the staffroom warning us to not flaunt Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses - under threat of Fatwah - so we stacked a whole column of them by the children's section and furtively escorted anyone asking for it, as if they had just asked for a book on beastiality. 

My experience on the shop floor today is a world of etiquette away from my first time around - however the familiar smell of new paper and glossy covers takes me back to those days of youthful insanity and I love it all over again.  Something that hasn't changed is the customer (directly wired to the moon) who comes in asking for a book with a purple cover about something to do with the Knights Templar, by someone who's written lots of similar books but he doesn't know what it's called or who it's by.  Usually at this point I'll lead them to Science Fiction and disappear and by golly they usually find what they are looking for.  Then there are those who want you to find a book that hasn't been written like a lady who asked me for a book on: How to Spot an Arsehole, Lying, Cheating Loser.  Tempting as it is to escort them to the office of the nearest therapist, you do have to entertain a semblance of interest and tap the title into the computer as they tell you their life story and you calculate how long until your break.

Then there are those who are just escorted off the premises. 

So I say this with no irony at all, while I've commanded positions of high (ish) rank and salaries to match (sort of) and now find myself stacking shelves alongside people with very different hobbies to me, I'm grateful for the opportunity to experience life at the granular level again.  I feel the muse tapping on my shoulder.  I feel the urge to write and that is a very difficult urge to coax out.

The job lasts until January at which time I will be let off the studio leash and into the big wide Yoga world and as I look forward to this new chapter in my life, part of me will not want to leave this crazy little world of words and people.