Why I'm Surly

This morning just after opening the doors to the store, a woman came up to the counter and said, "Do you have that new book?"

I was looking at her, waiting for her to finish the question with some sort of qualifier, but that was it. So I said, "Well, that's a pretty broad description! Do you know anything else about it?"

"It's that one with the newspaper columns."

"Well, what newspaper columns?" (I was actually thinkin' we might be getting somewhere.)

"I can't remember the reporter's name, but somebody was going to put them together and make a book out of them."

"Where did you hear about this book?"

"Somebody told me about it last year. Said it was coming out this year. Do you have it?"

We went around and around like this for nearly 10 minutes, until one of my bosses came out of the back of the store, so I passed her off to him, and then I got to listen to those questions asked again, got to see him look at her exactly the way I did, and made myself look very busy so he would have to handle this non-transaction to its highly unsatisfactory conclusion.

All the two of us were ever able to glean is that somebody told her a year ago that a book containing all the articles a reporter (she wasn't sure which one) for an Alabama newspaper (she wasn't sure which one) had ever written were going to be compiled into a collection because of the historical times in which they were written (she wasn't sure if it was the Civil War or Civil Rights).

This entire episode was just a gift from the laugh gods, so thank you.