Third time's the charm

My first week at work went by pretty quickly. Ok, it’s only three days but I’ve worked part-time before and trust me, three days can sometimes feel like forever. It consisted mainly of the inner workings of the bookstore: ordering books, receiving new shipments, databases, software, learning how the cash register works (just in case), getting to know the store and its extensive collection of books on philosophy, politics and history which baffles me every day.

To give you an example of their main public, a book by a Belgian philosopher whose name I already forgot (seeing as I don’t know anything beyond Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Hume, Descartes and Kant) outsold Belgium’s most popular thriller author Pieter Aspe on a scale of 12/1. Popular fiction like Aspe is also something they try to avoid in order to distinguish the store from the average commercial bookshop, making the store not only more literary and intellectually stimulating (some have even gone as far as calling it elitist) but also slightly tougher to get the hang off.

Another aspect that will take some getting used to, is getting to know your costumers. All my colleagues already know 90% of the clientele’s names as most of them are regulars. A daunting task indeed, but fun none the less.

My first impression, as you may have noticed, is very positive. I expect it will take me some time to get the hang off the job, the store and the many faces that pass through but I think I’m gonna like it here. And for the first time, my co-workers even seem great and that’s saying a lot.

Now I’d like to end this post with a cute little anecdote that proves that chance encounters don’t just happen in the movies. I was sitting at my desk in the back of the store scanning some new books that had arrived earlier that day when I overheard part of a conversation between a man and a woman who both reached for the same book on the Middle East. The man said to the woman that she could have it and she answered that she just wanted to know the price so he could take it. Anyway, they started talking about the book, that they were both retired schoolteachers and moved on to their hobbies, travels,… Twenty minutes later they parted ways after exchanging phone numbers proving that love can happen when you least expect it and in a bookstore none the less, how beautiful is that?