Will Harris on life in a far-from-quiet bookshop

My friend H has become a corporate troubleshooter. Don’t ask me how she managed to swing that one given that she suffers from a panic disorder and she’s deaf in one ear, but there you go.

You see, the bookshop where she works recently completed a hostile takeover of a slightly smaller bookshop in the next town over (well, I say hostile… no books were thrown), and H was duly dispatched to oversee the operation. “My role,” she explains, rather grandly, “is to evaluate the current team’s working practices, and seek ways to align them with our own.” What does that actually mean?

“New signs,” she replies, “and a rota”.

The rota, as it turns out, is a bit of a sticking point. The women H has been sent to manage have all been working at the bookshop since the days when it did a roaring trade in papyrus. This means not only are they set in their ways, they’ve also become unhelpfully accustomed to setting their own hours. Abigail, for a start, does not work mornings. “I can’t do mornings,” she tells H, “because I walk my dog in the mornings. If you make me do mornings, I’ll have to have the dog put down. And then my partner will leave me.”

“German Shepherds are enthusiastic. You wouldn’t want one driving you to work”

My friend, slightly baffled by this line of reasoning, calls Monica into the office. Monica is all teeth and hair, and refuses to work later than 3pm. “I’ve been diagnosed clinically depressed,” she says. “I’ve got a note.” She blows her nose for emphasis. Honk.

Shannon, the Saturday girl, is next across the desk. “I can’t do Saturdays,” she announces. H stabs herself in the face with a promotional Gruffalo.

Aside from the rota, my friend’s other big problem is Pam. Pam is different from her workmates in that she’s vaguely enthusiastic. (“You say that like it’s a good thing,” says H. “German Shepherds are enthusiastic. You wouldn’t want one driving you to work”.) At some point in the past, Pam was placed in the children’s section, presumably because that’s where she could do the least damage, all the books having rounded corners. She now spends most of her working hours conversing with the under-fives and painting with potatoes.

Pam also has a talent for getting things stuck in the till. This has graduated from a pair of scissors (that she somehow managed to wedge, half-open, inside the cashbox, so that H had to buy a hacksaw from Wilkinson’s and saw it apart) to actual children, after this week enticing a small boy to stick his arm through a gap in the woodwork and then gawping at him while he screamed the shop down. It took them half a bottle of Fairy Liquid and a jumbo bag of Haribo to get him loose. The hacksaw remained in the back office, thankfully.