A few years ago, I worked for a time at the Williams Sonoma/Pottery Barn Call Center. I took orders for expensive cookware and rugs and sconces and things like that. The job didn’t pay much, but I got a 40% discount at Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn. At first I worked there because I needed money. Later I worked there because of the discount. I learned how to work the system, and after the cash crunch was over, worked one day a week or less. Really, the 40% discount didn’t do much for me, since I had little money to spend on hundred dollar salad bowls, even if they were almost half off. The discount came in very handy for my friends, however. It was always fun to go shopping with friends who wanted to buy full sets of All-Clad pans and Wustoff Knives. After they saved a few hundred dollars they were always ready to take me out to a Martini and Oyster lunch. There was one guy, not really a friend but one of those 90’s chubby tech guys who had a million dollars all of a sudden. I was sort of interested for a second until I took him to Williams Sonoma to outfit his new loft in South of Market. He bought thousands of dollars worth of stuff, from a $750 orange espresso maker to some green egg-cups with gold flecks. The guy was a buying machine. And after, he took me to a taco shop for lunch. Bitch! Needless to say that was the end of my interest. A taco shop? Dude, how about lunch at the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus? I just saved you Two Thousand Dollars! He ended up getting busted by the IRS for not sending in his payroll taxes and split town, but that was a few months after the burrito incident.

But I am way off track here. This is not what I meant to write about, at all. What I meant to write was, one day when I was working at the Call Center, I got a call from some dude who had all kinds of questions about furniture in the Pottery Barn catalog. He quizzed me down good, and I gave him all the info off the computer screens as best I could. He eventually thanked me and told me that he was actually the manufacturer of the furniture he was asking about. To me it seemed he was maybe a little anal, possibly psychotic, but mostly just wanted to sell some furniture. Whatever.

A few weeks later I got called into my supervisor’s office. SHE then proceeded to quiz me down (I was getting sick of being quizzed) and told me that one of their vendors had called in and talked to someone who was totally inefficient and lame and stupid, also worthless. That someone, according to the vendor, was ME.

Now, I was generally golden at Williams Sonoma – they loved me, and that is how I got away with hardly ever working and still getting a discount for so long. When they had reviews, I had the #1 review of anyone in the call center, and was told I could have a “big future” at Williams Sonoma. (“Does that mean I’ll get Seven Fifty an hour?” I said. “Eventually” they said.) So I was pretty shocked when I was interrogated about my dealings with the furniture freak.

It didn’t take me long in the interrogation before I sort of figured out what was going on. I remembered about the furniture, I remembered telling the guy my name. He had actually placed an order with whoever had pissed him off so bad, Supervisor told me. He hadn’t placed an order with me, he’d only quizzed me down.

“Well then.” I said. “Why don’t you look at the order and see who took it?”

This hadn’t occurred to the head honchos at Williams Sonoma before they called me in to the interrogation. And they looked at the order, on the computer, right there in front of me. Their faces got frownier than before.

“Well, uh, Shannon.” My supervisor said. “I guess it wasn?t you, because it says right here that Tatiana took his order.”

What a bunch of dumbshits. Even worse, was the guy who called and mixed me up with Tatiana. Furniture guy. Anal freak furniture guy.

What I’m really trying to get at here is, I have turned into anal freak furniture guy. My book is not selling very well right now, and I can’t figure out why. It was selling, before, but all of a sudden it stopped. I don?t know if it’s a normally slow time for travel books to be selling or what. But I am spending way too much time calling bookstores and looking at travel websites and trying to figure out ways to grovel.

I call a bookstore and ask whoever answers the phone if they have my book, and they either don’t care, or they don’t want to look, but mostly they say no. I have been known to go into bookstores and put my book on the shelf, for free. I can’t understand why Borders orders once, and sells the book, and doesn’t reorder. Don’t they want to have everything, all the time? I thought that was Borders thang. What person is insane enough to go to Venice without The Book? How come bookstores don?t know this? How did I become the anal furniture guy? Gradually, then suddenly. Just like the story ends.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2004 at 8:43 pm and is filed under How do I get there, from here?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.