Grunt at War

Hello.

In the desolate outreaches of civilization, where even the bravest men fear to travel, I, alone, stand tall. Others may quiver at the mere thought of venturing past the gates, but I, alone, stay. There are few that could survive its barren loneliness, its constant threat of danger, and the ever present odor of death. But I, I alone, can claim complete ownership of this fear.

Today I worked in the music department of Booth and Noble.

As with most days in the music department of Booth and Noble, I found myself with nothing to do. No customers to help, no time to start "projects," no alphabetizing to do.

And then the pair of them walked in.

The daughter, pudgy and with a hint of cowardice, slunk behind her brazenly obese mother, who stormed up to me like a giant baguette of slander and hate.

"How do you have your CDs?" she exclaims, ejecting spittle as if my face were on fire.

"Excuse me?" I wipe.

"How do you have your CDs?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"If I wanted to find a CD, how would I look for it?"

"Oh, well, they're first organized by genre..."

She interrupted: "What. The HELL. Is Genre?"

I looked at her face: this was not a joke. "Genre is a way of organizing things by what category you'd put them in; for instance, we have "pop rock," "classical," "folk..."

"Never mind that fancy talk. I need a new CD, because some BITCH" and at this point she glares at her daughter with eyes of pure fury "decided to take and LOSE my BEST CD."

"Um...ok...I'm sorry" I say to the daughter more than to the mother, "what CD was it?"

"The Greatest Hits of Boyz II Men."

I stifle a giggle.

"Uh, yeah, that's right here," I say and hand it to her. She grabs it from me as if it was made of solid gold. I swear she would have licked it if I weren't there.

Meanwhile, the daughter has slowly wandered away to one of our listening stations. These are the kiosks where a customer can scan a CD underneath the barcode reader and listen to samples from that CD. We often have people asking us if the CDs themselves are broken if the kiosk only plays a few seconds of a track; we have to assure them that the CDs are working fine and the listening station just plays samples.

I assume the daughter was playing something by the Beastie Boys or NWA, because if this woman were my mother, I'd have issues with society as well.

The mother grabs the CD from me and waddles over to the listening station the daughter is on. Now, she is actually closer to a different listening station, and there are 25 listening stations literally within twenty feet of her. But she wanders over to her daughter's and says:

"Get the hell off this, I need to listen to my CD." Never in my life have I been so desperate to listen to a CD THAT I ALREADY KNOW.

The daughter gingerly pulls off the headphones and hands them to her mother. The mother:

"THANK you, you CD loser. I know what I'm doing."


"Mom," the daughter says, "do you want me to help you?"

"Get your hands away from this CD. I don't want you losing THIS one as well."

At this point I'm about to cry, the daughter is worn down and the mother is trying to use the listening station, and failing. Instead of scanning the CD, she's hitting the top of the listening kiosk with it.

Then, the daughter helps her and she starts to happily dance to On Bended Knee .

She pays for the CD - no, she does not have a membership card - and as they're walking out she turns to the daughter and says:

"If you lose this CD, I'll lose you."

I still don't know what this means, but if I were that daughter, I'd want to be lost.



The daughter