Children's bookstore. A woman enters carrying her dog, four year old son in tow. All are wearing designer clothes. The sales associate greets them."Do you have any classic Peter Pan?" The woman asks.
The woman follows the sales associate but pauses as they reach the books in a spinner rack. The associate continues on toward the Classics section. She looks at the several editions available, some complete and some abridged with glossy pages and nicely illustrated.
"Oh," she says flatly, "Nothing a four year old can read on his own?"
The sales associate apologizes for the misunderstanding. The woman backtracks to the spinner rack and holds up The Berenstain Bears and the Green-Eyed Monster. "Something classic, like this," she says.The sales associate suggest that perhaps Disney has an adaptation in that format, but it isn't carried in the store.
"Well, how's a four year old boy supposed to learn about Peter Pan?" she whines.
"I know parents that have read the story to their children," the sales associate says.
"Really," says the woman, leaving the store thirty degrees colder than when she entered it.
2 comments:
What a selfish woman --- never a thought that maybe her little dog too wanted something to read?
I deal with customers like that pretty regularly. A lot of people get it, which is awesome, but then you get a few who just don't. The worst part is, usually it's fairly obvious that the kid can barely read anyway, so even if you found a version that was simple enough the story wouldn't really get across unless the kid was being helped. It always makes me sad. Especially since often those kids seem really eager for a good story, not another book they have to struggle with. Talk about building reluctant readers! Very sad.
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