Sometimes I feel like Jaye Tyler on Wonderfalls. While not a graduate of Brown University, I do think I’m fairly intellectual. And like Jaye, I’m stuck in a retail job that is going no where. And while I like customer service, I feel as American’s, we are getting stupider. We make have this large information highway known as the internet, but we are still surrounded by people who don’t listen, who don’t pay attention. Their theory being that someone else will have the information for them.

I cannot count how many times over the last 17 years that I’ve worked in the book business where people come in and ask for a book.

What’s the title,?" I would ask.

I’m not sure, I think it had "The" in title.

Author?

I’m not sure, but they were on Good Morning America today. It was about oh, so big and had a blue cover.

Well, that clears it up. The blue section is over to your left.

Anyways, I try to ask probing questions, like what the book was about, if they can remember any part of the title. But the point is, most people will assume that the bookseller will know exactly what they are talking about. After all, if it’s being talked about on TV then naturally the book should be front and center. WGN radio here in Chicago has become my nemesis, if only because its listeners don’t write the title or the author down. They expect the seller to know what they want when they say the author was on WGN. The problem that lies here is that most bookseller’s are usually under the age of WGN’s demographic. I joke that it’s required by law that once you reach 50, you must listen to the station.

Which, at times, in no longer a joke. So, most workers would not listen to WGN if their life depended upon it. Same thing goes with WBEZ, the PBS station here in Chicago. But usually, these radio listeners know more than the WGN ones do. So is it an intellectual thing? The mass audience may listen to WGN but it might also might show the education level of its demographic base.

Intellectuals are feared by mass, as some are accused of being Anti-American, Anti-Christian and are after destroying the basic foundations on which America is based. While I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer (and my typing skills suck) I do feel that I am smart and know a lot of information.

Those ideas have helped me in my job. By spending hours reading, surfing the net and occasionally watching Oprah, I have been able to help customer who’ve come in with the littlest of information. But it also sometimes mystifies me these people’s brains can generate the electricity needed to move their legs.

Teenage girls are the worse at this, coming to the information desk in skanky outfits, twirling their hair and asking where the fiction section is and who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. When you point it out (and tell them I'm a homo so their girlie crap won't work on me), say literature is over there, they say, no I’m looking for the fiction section. Sometimes I want to scream at them,. Because these are the ones (like my niece) who think reading is boring and unnecessary because they’ll be marrying a guy who will be making lots of money.

But as much as I like my job, as much as I get great satisfaction out of helping a customer, I cannot help but feel disdain for them as well. I always associated readers as intellectuals. Now I’ve realized that most only read to keep up the Jones (such as the success of the Da Vinci Code proves). While I feel terrible that I’ve never read Twain, or Hemingway, Faulkner, Baldwin or even The Confederacy of Dunces, I know who and what they are and what they represent in book culture.

So, like Jaye Tyler, I help customers, but try to avoid their eyes. Most are mindless people driven into the bookstore not because they want to read, but because the need to know what everyone else is reading,

And wondering if Nora Roberts has written another book this week.