Sunday Morning Lamentations

It's always a bad sign when the phone rings before a shop opens: only a total wanker would ring a shop that's open for 12+ hours a day outside opening hours. Unfortunately, the world is full of berks, and in this case someone else picked up and redirected to me, sabotaging my attempts to "not hear" the ringing. A transcript follows:

"Good Morning, The Family Bookshop, Jumeirah"
"Ah, hello, is this The Family?"
"Yes"
"And are you a book shop?"
"...Yes"
[lengthy discussion of ordering many copies of a tedious Steven Covey book. I mention that the shop's not actually open and that I'll call back once I've rounded up enough copies.]
"Can I take your details so I can call you back?"
"OK, do you have my number?"

I'll reiterate that he called me.
I pointed this out to him, found the books after an appropriate vengeance delay, called back and discovered that he's one of this country's endless fax-chauvinists: people who when offered the opportunity to conduct business by the efficient, infinitely useful medium of email, vehemently insist instead on having documents faxed to them, inevitably two or three times due to the tendency of both originals and sent copies to be consumed at some point between sending and receiving by some kind of kobold that has evidently acquired a taste for warm invoices.

This strange terror of emails on the part of the Horde also led me on one occasion to give out my work mobile number, despite misgivings that turned out to be entirely correct, to a customer who desperately wanted to SMS me book details. I now have a stalker, who rings up once a day and asks the same question every time, even after several lengthy explanations of what "out of print" means. Why can't I just have a sex pest like everyone else?

Ramadan repeat season

Hello Children. I'm Mr Aedan. I sell books in Dubai. It's the same nonsense as anywhere else in the world, except it's actually against the law for me to tell people they're wrong.

As most of my customers are currently hiding in bed during the daytime, pretending that it counts as fasting if you just sleep all day, I don't have much to offer today apart from a variant on a classic theme:

"Hello, I'm looking for Middlemarch by Silas Marner."

I'd also like to point out that our best selling non-fiction book was Mein Kampf, until The Secret displaced it.