I won't be going into too much detail in this part, but there was an incident at my bookstore involving a adolescent boy. He tried to aggresively hit on a customer, but he got rejected and left the store crying.
I read about this on our little news site, and of course I was a bit concerned, even though the situation was handled.
But reading about that is probably why I was so freaked out about the...
MOANING INCIDENT.
So I went downstairs into the basement of the store, going to work on replacing the recommended tags when all of a sudden I heard a soft moan.
I didn't think anything of it at first, but then I heard it again.
And I froze.
As an awkward teenager (*cough cough* still am,) I did a "covert" turn around to try to find who was doing this.
It was a tall, older man. To be honest, he looked a bit homeless but he could've easily been a hipster. We get both of those around our store sometimes.
When I was looking at him (COVERTLY,) he did it again.
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| This was my reaction, not him moaning btw |
Luckily, one of the business people I knew (who I shall name "May") was walking past at the same moment I couldn't find one of the books to put a rec tag for.
"May! May." I tried to have composure but I'm never composed. "Mind helping me find this book? I've been looking but can't." I make an "oh you" face at myself.
She nodded, "Sure. This section is always terribly shelved for some reason."
We both looked for the book, and I wanted to tell her so badly about the moaning man but he was less than two yards behind me and he would've heard me. So I kept waiting for her to acknowledge it, but she never did.
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| What I wanted to do, to be honest |
After like two minutes, she just shrugged and said, "Sorry, Owyn. I can't find it. I'm sure (your boss) will understand." Then she had to leave to do businessy things.
I just nodded and tried not to cling to her legs sobbing so I wouldn't be alone.
I finished the rest of the rec tags as quickly as possible and then ran to my friend in the Used section, "Mia."
"Hey what's up?" She greeted, spinning around on her swivel chair because she's cool.
"Okay I'm kinda freaked out right now." I told her.
She froze as well, "What happened?" She said, instantly concerned because I was essentially the baby of the store employees at 15 then 16-years-old.
I told her everything. And she went downstairs to check on it while I manned the Used section.
And by "manned the Used section," I mean "spun around in the swivel chair and waited for people to show up but no one did."
In a total reversal of my bad timing, right as Mia was about to tell me what she discovered about the Moaning Man, a customer came in with a lot of books and I had to head back up to my boss "Elaine" anyway.
When I walked the flights upstairs to the office I worked at, I explained to Elaine what happened and she was concerned too, even though I explained that I was fine.
We called Mia, and Mia said that she went downstairs to the section I told her, and waited for him to make the moaning noise. She said he did it a couple of times (while reading an architecture book for the record) and she approached him as a bookseller and said, "Is there anything I can help you with?"
Apparently, he was totally polite and nice and said, "No thank you!" Before turning back to the book.
My boss and I shared a look, then Mia explained, "I think he might just breathe like that. I don't think those weird noises had any ill-intentions towards anyone."
After that phone call, my boss and I had a nice laugh about it and I went back to work.
I remembered this incident the other day, and I was like: "This needs to be a blog post." So hear it is.
Yay!
Hope you liked the story, and tell me if you want more!
Sincerely,
Owyn the Intern
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