The Good Book and the Wide-Eyed Shoppkeepe

What is it about stupid people and their stupid assumptions?

Yesterday I went to the local bookstore to pick-up something for a friend's birthday, found what I was looking for, and then decided to try and enlist the help of one of the employees in at the very least steering me in the right direction. What a mistake that was.

Let me start off by saying, I'm not one of those assholes that goes into any restaurant, mall store, or coffee shop and decides to piss all over "the help" to make myself feel superior. No no no, I despise people that do that. I worked for many years in both retail and the service industry so I consider myself sensitive to that matter. And I just believe in basic human decency. But, with that said, it really takes all of my inner strength to fight the urge to not verbally abuse those wonderful people you meet on a daily basis that are truly ignorant and incompetent.

Here's what I was looking for (and I have to say this subject matter has always fascinated me, yet I've never made the time to explore it further). I was looking for a some type of referential or historical text that gives insight into the history of the bible. Not a bible, or a book full of bible studies, but a history of the bible, preferably from a non-Christian author.

The first woman points me towards, you guessed it, the bible section. And let me tell you, there were a whole lot of bibles there. I asked her again and tried to clarify. This time she led me to the "Christian Inspiration/Bible Study" section. So I gave up on her. So I went and found a different guy (he looked like a semi-liberal hippy type). Holy shit was I wrong. I proceeded to debate with him what I meant, and he proceeded to tell me that the bible was in fact a history book, the only history book, and actually that he didn't even understand my question. So I gave up on him.

The third woman I tried a different tactic. I told her about how a few years ago when the Da Vinci Code was insanely popular all the major chain bookstores had entire tables of referential type books of something similar to what I was looking for ranging from the Templars vs. the Assassins, to the true life of Mary Magdalen, to the lost gospels of Jesus Christ. I told her to point me in that direction and I would just look for myself. She searched on her computer (all while rolling her eyes and pounding the keys) and then walked me over to the "New Age" section where she pointed me to the Satanic Bible. She then declared, "This is the closest thing we have, now is there anything else?"

I had to control my laughter and contempt all at once. I didn't know how to react within my own body. So I thanked her and just flipped through the Satanic Bible for a few seconds. I didn't even know they had it at major chain stores. This was it for her, in her mind if it wasn't the bible then it was the Satanic bible. Wow.

But I have to admit, it did make me feel proud to be an American...