Reading by Moonlight

I started a new moonlighting gig tonight. After my regular day drudgery dealing with computer issues, I raced back down the state highway I use to avoid the interstate, honking my horn as I passed the house, and pulled into the parking lot of a major national bookseller to begin my orientation.

Yes. A bookseller.

A couple years ago I worked as a cart-pusher for a major nation department store. It was grueling, nasty work, and I hated it. But they were willing to work me thirty hours a week, and I lasted at that job four months before my wife convinced me that it wasn't worth our marriage to pick up a few extra bucks.

This is different. This is books. The fact that it's inside work, and I'm only taking twenty hours a week, and it's only for the holidays, is beside the point. It's books. This is the kind of job I should have had when I was twenty-five. Sure, there's heavy lifting, and I'll be on my feet for eight hours, but I'll be lifting books. And the customers I'll be dealing with are readers, not those yahoos who want me to stuff their new 42" TV in the back seat of an '82 Honda. With two carseats. So they can take their new toy back to the trailer park.

No, these customers are looking for things to read, and someday they may reading something with my name on it. Which could, of course, be considered cool in some circles.

So how does the wife feel about this job?

All I had to do was bring up the thirty percent discount on books. And fifty percent in the internationally-recognized brandname coffee shop. Where they have desserts and frothy pink drinks.

I think we'll be OK....