Post by Heavy Metal on Jul 2, 2011 21:06:33 GMT -5
"The Customer Is Always Right" by Alexander Goodlive (Never heard of him, but word on the street is he’s got purdy hair)
A strange phenomenon exists in the world: I don’t know what it is, but something about shopping malls makes the human brain reject order, rationality, and basic human decency. TCIAR is a ‘day in the life’ tale of a few brave unfortunates struggling to retain their sanity - and trust me, that’s neither an easy nor enviable task. If the encounters with functionally retarded (and often clownshit insane) customers seem exaggerated – congratulations, you never had to do this for a living.
Alex and his friend Brian are the primary players, respectively employed at a movie and game shop. Much of the story takes place inside the strange subculture that builds among disenchanted employees of any mass retail setting. Anyone who’s ever been part of it will recognize it. Breaks are your time to gather at the Orange Julius to swap war stories while gawking at the all-female, all-attractive, not-remotely-attainable JCPenney Girls. You do your best to give each other the morale boost you need to survive, and sometimes you’ve got to engage in some high-octane shenanigans to stave off ennui.
(Side note - I never dueled anyone in the middle of a mall, but I WAS once part of a full-scale war involving inflatable fish. These things happen when you’re suppressing the urge to rip out the spine of the next person you see and show it to their children.)
The dialogue is light and punchy for the most part. The episodes of screwball banter with Brian were a highlight of the book for me. I’d describe the exchanges as a little Daria and Jane with a smidgen of Dante and Randall, atop a heaping helping of Alex’s signature snark. Very funny stuff - it’s plenty sarcastic enough to be cathartic, but never quite crosses over to mean-spiritedness. Myself, after the second encounter with the Boss, I wanted him to let it fly like Tony Montana, but I’ve got a potty mouth.
The main story is only about 80 pages, which makes for an easy read. Filling out the rest of the book are three bonus chapters of Alex and Brian’s further adventures at their new job at a grocery store, and two more chapters previewing an upcoming sequel about the Lovecraftian nightmare horror that is Black Friday. If a shudder didn’t go down your spine at those two words – congratulations, you never had to do this for a living.
I found TCIAR easy to relate to as I endured many versions of that same hell myself, just a couple decades earlier. For as much as things have changed in the last five years, they apparently didn’t change at all in the twenty years before that. But as the author says, observing people at their absolute worst somehow has a redeeming feeling to it.
N's Rating: Never doubt the Big Shaggy Ostrich.
A strange phenomenon exists in the world: I don’t know what it is, but something about shopping malls makes the human brain reject order, rationality, and basic human decency. TCIAR is a ‘day in the life’ tale of a few brave unfortunates struggling to retain their sanity - and trust me, that’s neither an easy nor enviable task. If the encounters with functionally retarded (and often clownshit insane) customers seem exaggerated – congratulations, you never had to do this for a living.
Alex and his friend Brian are the primary players, respectively employed at a movie and game shop. Much of the story takes place inside the strange subculture that builds among disenchanted employees of any mass retail setting. Anyone who’s ever been part of it will recognize it. Breaks are your time to gather at the Orange Julius to swap war stories while gawking at the all-female, all-attractive, not-remotely-attainable JCPenney Girls. You do your best to give each other the morale boost you need to survive, and sometimes you’ve got to engage in some high-octane shenanigans to stave off ennui.
(Side note - I never dueled anyone in the middle of a mall, but I WAS once part of a full-scale war involving inflatable fish. These things happen when you’re suppressing the urge to rip out the spine of the next person you see and show it to their children.)
The dialogue is light and punchy for the most part. The episodes of screwball banter with Brian were a highlight of the book for me. I’d describe the exchanges as a little Daria and Jane with a smidgen of Dante and Randall, atop a heaping helping of Alex’s signature snark. Very funny stuff - it’s plenty sarcastic enough to be cathartic, but never quite crosses over to mean-spiritedness. Myself, after the second encounter with the Boss, I wanted him to let it fly like Tony Montana, but I’ve got a potty mouth.
The main story is only about 80 pages, which makes for an easy read. Filling out the rest of the book are three bonus chapters of Alex and Brian’s further adventures at their new job at a grocery store, and two more chapters previewing an upcoming sequel about the Lovecraftian nightmare horror that is Black Friday. If a shudder didn’t go down your spine at those two words – congratulations, you never had to do this for a living.
I found TCIAR easy to relate to as I endured many versions of that same hell myself, just a couple decades earlier. For as much as things have changed in the last five years, they apparently didn’t change at all in the twenty years before that. But as the author says, observing people at their absolute worst somehow has a redeeming feeling to it.
N's Rating: Never doubt the Big Shaggy Ostrich.
