12 October 2013

Tales from the Massachusetts Retail Trade

A nice couple came up to the register to make their purchase (I shan't call them elderly, which might not be flattering, but I felt confident that I was their junior), and the gentleman spoke up with some warmth about an entirely different matter. There was a woman in the shop, he said, who had already been told by a manager not to do so, but she was going on all the same, leafing through an art book and violating all decency and most international copyright regulations by photographing page after page of art reproductions.

In the first place, who pulls this sort of nonsense?  And in the second place, who goes on doing so after being asked not to?

I wheel out from the registers, and make my way gingerly through the clowder of shoppers, trying to find this woman they had pointed to (but who was out of my line of sight when the gentleman had pointed).  At last I found her, though before actually clearing a fixture to find her in view, there was the sound of a book being hastily shut, and at last I beheld this brazen bint rushing up out of the chair where she had been chewing the devil's own backside, rather than keeping to the prudent and good lessons taught to her by her ancestors.  Her face was overwritten with the awareness that she had no business in the least doing what she was doing, nor did I mince words.  "You cannot do this, and I understand you've already been told so. You have to leave the shop."  "Yes, I go," she offered.

I returned to wait on the couple, who were not at all put out at having to stand unattended at the counter while I chided the recreant draggletail.  "They really have no respect at all for the intellectual property of others, do they?"

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