Welcome to Barnes and Noble. How can I help you?

The phone rings again for the 5th time in 10 minutes, its annoyingly digitized voice screaming for attention, my body leaning towards it in a menacing fashion, forboding my finely controlled moment of insanity. I grab it by the neck in a single-handed choke-hold and the words march from my lips like the sure feet of an all too efficient platoon.

"Barnes and Noble Sugar Land. This is Peter. How can I help you?"

Without fail, the voice on the other end is anxious and expectant, fully convinced that every employee of a bookstore is endowed with infallible omniscience in all fields of literature, small gift diaries for teenage girls, and oversized magnifiers for the near-blind elderly.

A person can be defined by the books he or she reads. The middle age mother of three looking for a guide to better housekeeping, a 20-something man looking over financial plans, hoping to discover the secrets to striking it rich, an elderly woman searching for books on religious inspiration, preparing for the moment when God returns in his second reincarnation. The connection is so obvious at times that I cannot help but let the laughter inside me spill over and betray itself in a faint courteous smile.

"Welcome to Barnes and Noble. How can I help you?"