Stu Hall's Soup

The big idea was that I would bring my spiffy mobile phone from England over to Canada and just take out the O2 Simcard and replace it with a Fido or Rogers simcard. The plan went well up until the point where I dropped the phone on the ground, whereafter it would abruptly turn off at inopportune moments.

Upon moving to Canada, much of my money was put aside for the essentials until I could get a job and much of the rest of it was used to line the government’s pockets through astronomical immigration fees. Oh, and I wanged a load of cash on computer stuff. Anyway, I had to get a new phone and decided to just get a cheap one for the time being. A year later, I still have the same one.

The phone is quite shit. I get tired of having to delete text messages once every couple of weeks when the memory gets full, like it’s still 1989. I can win the java demo of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire every single time, having memorised every question. It has a camera built into it, of sorts. It can only hold about 10-12 pictures and the images come out blurred to such a degree that I often wonder if the phone’s firmware has a built in impressionism filter.

Since I cannot remove the images from the camera, only being able to keep 10-12 images has an interesting effect. I become more selective, deleting anything that I don’t really care that much about. So what I’ve found is that the small number of images tends to tell a bit of a story of the time I’ve spent living in Toronto. In fact, each image also tells it’s own story. What is also worth noting is that most of the images are from the first year I spent here, suggesting that everything is normalised for me now. There isn’t as much novelty and not every street I turn onto leads to a surprise anymore.

Because the phone is *so* utterly shit that I can’t download the images from it, I will have to describe the images I have kept.

1. Image000.jpg
One of the first winters I spent here, and it was a particularly harsh one. Around April, when the snow was still around but wasn’t as overwhelming, a baby racoon clambered over a fence and obligingly posed for a photo. Well, actually it was begging for food.

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My wife was away for a while studying up in North Bay. Taffy, her pet dog misses her and sits on the sofa looking out for her whenever she hears a neighbour. The picture is her with her eyes practically jumping out of her head when she thinks she hears Sara’s return.

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I went to the Ontario Science Museum with Tess. In the gift store, they have these tacky spaceman helmets. Tess wears one and gurns at the camera, alluringly.

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Photo of our street winding into the middle-distance. Practically everything in the photo is white, covered in snow. Taken as I walked home from a horrible day at work followed by me trudging trough 3 miles of snow off the bus-route.

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New job, new location. I started working near downtown Scarborough and my journey took me across a bridge over the 401 highway with the office buildings of Scarborough Town Centre in the distance. Not particularly impressive to anyone who lives around here, but at the risk of sounding like a country bumpkin, it was to me when I first arrived.

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Yet another job. I used to work for The Toronto Blue Jays. I would usually arrive for work early and just sit outside The Rogers Centre and read a book. One day a female mallard duck trundled up beside me and stood at my feet watching me. I took a photo, but didn’t have any food to say thanks.

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When I left that job I forced a work colleague who I started to get on with to have her picture taken with me. It came out badly, with us composed in the bottom of the frame and generally looking awkward. And my colleague, Stephanie, is doing her default photo pose face.

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On a trip to Pennsylvania my wife tried on a couple of dresses she liked. We couldn’t decide which to get because she looked great in both of them. I took a photo of her in one of them, but due to the blurred image and low resolution, no conclusions could be drawn from the evidence.

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I worked at a warehouse for a while and didn’t particularly enjoy it. I am a grammar nazi and many people working there were recent immigrants who didn’t speak English as a first language, much less write it. This included janitorial staff who left a poster in the washroom saying “HEY GUYS PLEASE KEEP IT CLEAN WE KNOW WHO YOU’RE DOING IT KEEP IT CLEAN AT ALL TIME". The sign basically represented everything I hated about the place.

10. Image010.jpg
Related to the above job. The warehouse stocked clothing. It was all quite, quite awful clothing. I have nothing against Bangladesh, but I’m not sure that the country is known for it’s fashion. New York, London, Paris… Dhaka? No. There was a catalogue with all the clothing, and the cover featured a woman wearing the centre-piece item: A wind-breaker style coat. Yellow and black. The woman was borderline model material, but to relieve any doubts about the cover photo, a windswept effect was applied with the addition of a wind fan to the photographer’s studio.

And, er. That’s it. Until I take anymore exciting images.

The Continuing Saga…

As I said at the start of my last post, I enjoy working as a bookseller. I like selling books and I enjoy providing advice and customer service to the majority of people. These posts might seem like I’m ranting. And I am. But it’s in the name of humour. So that makes it okay!

We are not the most famous bookstore in the World

Until we do become the centre of the Universe, here are some things that we cannot do for you:

Get hold of a book that we don’t carry - If we don’t carry it, we don’t carry it. We can only sell the books that our distributors can provide. Go on, keep asking. See if I suddenly change my mind.

Ask an author to hurry up and finish their book. – We do not maintain intimate relationships with book authors. I do not have brunch with Ken Follett in NYC or pay quick visits to California in order to walk Dean Koontz’s golden retriever.

You cannot talk to “the company owner” by calling our store. Like the majority of bookstores these days, it is a chain store and although ownership has changed a few times, it has been a chain store for decades. The CEO is at home receiving a massage while watching Oprah as a servant prepares Foie Gras for supper.

Sales Clerks are people
Sales clerks are not all stupid. They are also not omniscient. I’ll write more about hiring and staff another time, but basically you are not going to find biologists working in the medical reference section of the store. We all have varying degrees of general knowledge, but for the most part we don’t have *actual* degrees. You need to be able to communicate your needs to the person helping you. If you are either pressuring the sales person or you are purposefully withholding information from the sales person simply so that you can patronise them for their supposed lack of knowledge, then it is you that is failing to communicate.

Sales clerks are people and can only hold an interest in so many subjects. It is part of our job to know our stock…. But let’s keep some perspective. Most retail workers aren’t going to feel obliged by their sub-$10-an-hour-wage to research the excruciating details of the latest New Age nonsense fad.

We are more likely to learn about Mayan Prophecies, Pilates, Freud, Quantum Physics, Acupuncture, Edward Cullen and other subjects we don’t care about (often in our own time) because we enjoy doing a good job and not because we are paid the top dollars. Being treated like an idiot makes you feel resentful rather than motivated.

Another note: I find it bewildering that customers occasionally tell you they are looking for a particular book that was here a year ago and had a purple cover (totally useless information 99% of the time) and then treat you like an idiot when you don’t whip the book off the shelf for them. Browsing a bookstore and looking for advice is great – that’s one reason we’re here. But if you’re looking to buy a very specific book, you really should have a specific idea of what the hell you’re looking for.

Will you sell my book for me?
Very unlikely. You probably think it’s better than anyone else thinks it is.

Part three coming eventually…

I just wanted to make a quick post to put some perspective on the comparison between the Twilight series and the Harry Potter series. There’s a lot of excitement around online communities where some people seem convinced that Twilight is “better” than Harry Potter. A lot of trumpeting 14-year-old-girls seem convinced of this as fact. What I find equally annoying are press-releases from certain companies in the book industry like this one.

The Harry Potter books were released over a long period of time and The Twilight Saga has seen a much more sudden spike in popularity, so the content of the press release shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. The press release is simply an exercise in beating up book sales.

From my perspective, I’m not a big fan of either. I missed the boat on Harry Potter and have never really made the time to read it. During the peak of the anticipation over the Twilight series, I was working at a bookstore (and still am). I’ve occasionally been tempted to read it, mainly because I enjoy writing and I like the idea of satirising it and all the pre-teen girly excitement over it, but I never got around to it. I have seen the Harry Potter movies because my wife loves it, but I haven’t seen Twilight.

Here is a simple list of approximate booksales for each of the books:
120 Million Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (1st book)
77 Million Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets (2nd book)
66 Million Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (4th book)
65 Million Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince (6th book)
61 Million Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (3rd book)
55 Million Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (5th book)
44 Million Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (7th book)
17 Million Twilight (1st book)

I can’t find sales for New Moon and it wouldn’t be fair to show Eclipse and Breaking Dawn as they are only available in hardcover (in North America). The combined Twilight Saga (all 4 books combined) have sold 53 Million copies – beating only one single book from the Harry Potter Series. It is worth noting that Deathly Hallows sold 15 Million copies in the first 24 hours – almost as many as Twilight has ever sold.

Of course, there’s no accounting for taste (The Spice Girls have sold 60 Million records worldwide). In terms of entertainment, I’m sure the hormonal lusting in Twilight speaks volumes to the majority of the books fans. It’s never going to appeal to very many guys or very many adults, though – something Harry Potter does.

So if you can’t easily measure quality, here is an objective fact: In terms of literary worth, Meyer herself says that she should not be compared to J.K. Rowling.