I manage a (soon to be defunct) Borders Express. I've been with the company for over fourteen years and this week was the first week where I didn't know what new books were coming out and it felt like I'd been punched in the chest.
Fact number one: I love books.
Fact number two: I love talking to people about books - customers, friends, fellow employees, random strangers on the street ...
Fact number three: I am awesome at talking to people about books, even books I hadn't read before (which lately is almost everything - curse you, internet, for stealing my concentration and snagging my attention!).
Fact number four: I couldn't care less about any other retail job other than a retail job that allows me to continue to share my love of books, deal with the people who only remember that it's blue and we had it upfront three years ago, and shoo the teens out of the sex section.
After fourteen years in one company, it's scary to consider finding something new and I realized, staring at Career Builders and Monster, that I really didn't want to find something new. The realization dawned on me as I checked off "Swimming" as my sole athletic area of interest on an application for a manager position at Dick's Sporting Goods. The only "Swimming" I truly enjoy is sitting on my pool float and reading, but I figured I could talk my way around that in an interview.
Yesterday I had a great conversation with a DM from another book store and I'm cautiously optimistic that my really haphazard job search will be over. I know the book industry is changing and we have to change with it. Borders wasn't very good at deciding just how go about that change - there were really stupid decisions made over the years that even my booksellers noticed. If the woman who works five hours a week is able to realize you're making bad decisions, but you don't, then there's something wrong here.
It will also be nice to have a voice again and to have doors open for advancement. They were there at Borders, but a few years ago, when the writing was on the wall, it was no longer safe to walk through them. Those jobs were the first to be cut - you could scale back on DM's and home office personnel, but you would always need people in the field as long as there were stores to manage.
And now that things are winding down at work and I'm managing an increasingly empty store, I'm going to take my downtime and try my hand at blogging. I've done the whole LiveJournal thing, but that was more personal and private and I want to use this as a place to share book recommendations (I have a feeling, future job or not, I will have some free time on my hands to FINALLY catch up on some reading) and discuss my writing (and let's be realistic here - the occasional fangirly post about my favorite actor).
Here goes nothing ...
