A day at work

Note: The story is a couple of years old, but I'll keep it in the present tense.


It's a regular day at the shop. 

Anyone who's ever worked in a shop knows how it goes. There are bad and there are less bad days. It all depends. Maybe some of your coworkers will come to work all bitchy, maybe it's gonna be a dumb-ass customer or maybe you just got up on the wrong foot. But for the sake of the story, let's say it's a regular day.

There's always something to do, whether it includes a customer or not. At those rare moments the shop is empty, you use the time to fix something up, deal with some unavoidable number crunching or, from time to time, just enjoy an eventual minute of peace.

So I'm walking around, fixing up incense sticks and some price tags when a lady comes in. Not one which would seem a regular customer, but we have those that everyone just hates. Everyone except our boss. Our dumb-ass-kissing boss. It's the kind that comes into the shop wearing a thousand bucks on each hand and three animals on her but is ready to haggle about a discount for half an hour. And she runs into me. That's my luck.

I'm not the pushy kind, so I ask her if she needs any help. She politely declines (maybe seeing I'm on the verge here), but I see her eyes going around all lizard-like. I see that in the tram, when we're going fast enough, but people are still trying to catch everything with their eyes. Kind of open-eyes-REM style...

I tell her she can feel free to look around and that she may ask me for any help she might need and then I go by my business. She's roaming the shop, all five thousand articles there must be, but she's not happy. So I take a deep breath and I go closer, asking if she may be looking for something special.

- 'I'm looking for Buddha', she says.

- 'Okay, a specific one perhaps?' (Since there's always some shit being advertised in some fancy magazines, so people want exactly that Buddha or whatever.)

- 'No, nothing really specific.'

- 'Alright, we have this wooden one, there is a bigger one in stone and there are some smaller ones over here', I present them as if I were a host at a car show. Or TeleShop.

She is frowning and I see she's not happy with any of them.

- 'Are there any more?'

- 'No, I'm sorry. I could check the storage for you, but only tomorrow.'

She frowns even more.

It probably doesn't sound like an exciting job, but you wouldn't imagine what kind of questions people are able to ask.

So she says thanks, but she'll go and look somewhere else.

Some of my coworkers get back from their break and the office and whatever and I start telling them the story. It's always the nicest part of the day, laughing at the stuff that's happened. And quite sad, now that I think of it.

As I'm finishing up the story and we're trying to catch our breath ('cause there's like a thousand Buddhas in the shop), the lady is back at the door, swinging it wide open with one hand and she walks inside like she's carrying the Olympic torch, while actually carrying a small paper bag in her other hand.

- 'I found the real Buddha!', she says and goes all Kathy Bates on me, flashing me with her glare from all across the shop.

Turning around vigorously on her heel, she starts closing the door, but she stops, swinging them in the other direction and keeping them that way, leaving the shop wide open. She looks at me again and, probably proud of the fact that she's made me have to go and close the door, she storms out.

My colleagues are still standing close to the door since I was telling the story. There's a short moment of disbelief, silence and wide-open eye-gazing and then it's all lost in an avalanche of laughter. They're mimicking her lifting up the paper bag, finding the real Buddha and all that. I'm not sure if I'd be better of crying or laughing, but I tag along and laugh at how silly some people are.

Now that I think of it, maybe she did find the real Buddha.

Photo from the Tibetan Museum in Hüttenberg, Austria