So you just have to bear this in mind when I tell you about the break that the Hubs and I were taking in the coffee shoppe at Barnes & Noble over the weekend. It started off simply enough…after doing some early Christmas shopping (yes, I am that girl, who does Christmas shopping in October) and feeling a bit parched, we decided to park our butts and have a beverage while we rested our weary bones for a bit.

So I’m sipping my IBC Cream Soda, which, btw, is some of the best cream soda I’ve ever tasted.  And since I seldom drink pop (why waste perfectly good calories on pop when I could throw them away on pasta…or biscuits…or mashed potatoes–all of which I’d had just an hour earlier at Red Lobster…but I digress) I was just sort of savoring it as I did a little people-watching, natch.

As I was scanning the store, my eyes landed on a person sitting on the opposite side of the coffee shoppe’s glass-partition wall. I could only see the back of the person’s head (a rather greasy-haired looking head, as I recall), and it seemed to be a man from that vantage point. I noticed he had a book in his hand and was kind of flipping the pages. No big deal. Perhaps he was waiting for someone?

But as my eyes bounced around they kept landing on the greasy-haired man, and as I let my eyes watch him for a longer period, I soon became perplexed. Then befuddled. Then, wait for it…SHOCKED. Yes, shocked. And then seriously, the ick factor actually began to set in. And why, you ask (and I don’t blame you since I’m kind of dragging it out for you)? What could possibly have shocked me into the ick factor at Barnes & Noble?

It was because the greasy-haired man was not just mindlessly flipping the pages of a book. No. No. And NO! He was flipping the pages of the book…repeatedly…very close to his face…so he could smell the book. He was visibly and quite deliberately smelling the book, people…and pausing only occasionally to also…sniff…his…fingers.

WTH?! And in this case, I think a WTF is also in order!

Why? I mean, seriously, WHY? Is there something about books I don’t know? Or does this dude have a fetish I’ve just never heard of until now (and dammit I wish I’d been left in the dark about!). Granted, there are worse things the guy could have been sniffing, but still. It’s. Just. Icky.

So of course I had to whisper to the Hubs what I had witnessed so that he could gawk and stare like an idiot take a casual glance just as I had. And yeah, we sort of laughed it off, but we were both rather taken aback by the whole scene. So of course we made sure to walk past this man on the way out of the coffee shoppe.

While I personally was too far into the ick factor to let my eyes linger too long as we passed, I looked just long enough to realize that maybe the greasy-haired man was actually a greasy-haired woman. He/She appeared to have boobs, but hey, they could have been man-boobs for all I know.  The hair was short, but the clothing was ambiguous. And I sure wasn’t gonna turn back for another look once we’d gotten clear of him/her. I asked the Hubs what he thought, and he couldn’t decide if it was a man or a woman either.

But one thing is certain, and I shit you not, people: I was sitting less than 6 feet away from the greasy-haired, androgynous Barnes & Noble Book Smeller!

And how was your weekend?

After Hobby Lobby and a nice meal at Olive Garden, we were heading past the mall to head home when I spied Barnes and Noble. Now I’ve only ever been to B&N online; I honestly didn’t know they even had “real” stores. This one had to be fairly new because I know it wasn’t always there at the mall. I’m not into mall hopping anyway…just not my thing. But since we were right there and in no hurry to get home, I asked the Hubs to pull in so we could browse.

Now I don’t know about you, but I love book stores, and I avoid them most of the time for that very reason. I could easily spend hundreds of dollars in there in very short order. It’s kind of like how guys are in hardware stores or anyplace that carries tools. If I see some I want, I have to buy them. I just love books! But since I seldom actually have the hundreds of dollars to spend in there (and on this day it was certainly no different), I just don’t go in book stores too often. But since I’d never been into an actual B&N, I figured this would at least be worth the effort.

After scouring the parking lot for a parking space–which is never an easy task at that mall so it’s something I do not attempt too often–and then squeezing our car into one of the undersized mall parking spaces, we headed to the doors of B&N. We got to the entryway, which had several people kind of milling about in it, and noticed it looked kind of dark in the store. As we tried to make our way past the people, a store employee stopped to inform us:

“I’m sorry, but we’ve had a power outage and we are not letting customers inside the store. We do, however, have staff members on hand who will gladly browse for books for you and…”

OK, I stopped her right there. While in my mind I’m thinking nothing more than WTH?!, I just shrugged her off, said “no thanks” and headed back out the door from whence I entered.

I mean, are they kidding me? They are going to browse for books for me? How does that work exactly? Were they gonna send an employee into the dark belly of the store, have her randomly grab books, hold them up and holler back at me with, “How about this one?” And then I would, in turn, yell back, “Maybe, could you read me a couple of pages to see if I like it?” Um, yeah, I don’t think so.

Book shopping, except for the occasions when you’re only in a book store to buy one specific book, is a very personal experience. It’s not something someone else can do for you, and I’d think B&N staff would kind of know this. Why else do book stores have chairs and coffee shops in them? Perhaps because people are going to spend a bit of time in there…reading?

Apparently, the store had been without power since a thunderstorm passed through FW earlier that morning. And from what I could gather from other folks who had been talking to the B&N employees before our arrival, the employees had been standing at the doors all day telling every customer who showed up the same things they told us. We heard another customer say, “that’s a long time to be standing in the doorway.” Uh, ya think?

So my question is this, Barnes & Noble: why on earth didn’t you just put a sign on the front door that explained about the power outage, thereby preventing people from going through the hassle of trying to find an undersized parking space in a crowded mall parking lot and making the trek from their car to your front door, only to find out that they could not even go inside?!

Hmm. Maybe they were just afraid that people wouldn’t want to read their sign…because, um, you know, people that go to book stores…don’t like to read.