SPOddities.

I'm about a month into my new position at Borders. Officially, I've moved from being a bookseller to a member of IPT, the group o kids who are in charge of taking stuff out of boxes and putting it on shelves. Actually, my new job is rather specialized: I get my own email address and my own desk full of interesting treasures (such as a dozen box cutters, a phone list for employees from when the store first opened, gold stickers with 79¢ printed on them), and lots of random responsibilities without any more money than I was making when I spent two hours of my average day leaning on the register, staring into space. Ah well.

One thing that's turned out to be a little weird about the SPO job is how much I now know about our regular customers. There's the obvious: emails, phone numbers, and preferred spellings of ridiculous names. But then there's the odd trivia. There's a lady who buys only cowboy romances, usually with three or four open orders at any given time. There's an old woman who seems to order based on the "I remember this, I should buy it" logic. Last time I talked to her on the phone, she described some generic plot points to me with the hope that I could name the movie for her. There's a guy who orders books about meditation that always arrive smelling of Nag Champa.

And then there's this guy:

I imagine him to be a tall, scrawny Indian fellow from England whose hair is a little to slicky and whose laugh is 40% brash and 60% mortified. And he's obsessed with Mariah Carey. Over the past two weeks he has placed about 15 orders for Mariah Carey products. Sometimes he orders twice to make sure he gets what he wants. There are the CDs you'd expect, of course: albums, best of's and the like. And there are DVDs: movies she's starred in, live concerts, and cheaply produced documentaries of her career from random music channels. And then there are the books. These books are almost all in what we in the biz call "Library Binding." Unlike normal hardcovers, with usually come with a dust jacket or something equally classy, these books have the cover art imprinted on the cardboard and then shellacked for protection. They have identical pictures of Mariah on the front and bear titles like Mariah Carey: Her Story. I imagine they are meant to inspire young girls, little divas-in-training. I do not know what my English Indian gentleman wants with them.

And, not knowing, I feel as if I know far too much.