Typical Men Problems
A regular and her five-year-old daughter walk in. The mother explains to me that her daughter wants a book to give to her brother, who is nineteen. The daughter walks up to me.
Daughter: “I want a book about men.”
Me: *Utterly perplexed* “I’m sorry?”
Daughter: *Insistently* “I want a book about men!”
Mother: “Do you mean you want a book with men in it?”
The daughter can’t figure out what to say next, so she just looks at me expectantly. The mother and I are completely confused. We try to figure out what the daughter is saying, and the girl only gets more frustrated that we don’t understand.
Mother: “Wait, do you mean you want a book with a picture of a man on the cover?”
Daughter: *Beaming* “Yeah! A book about men!”
I am pointing at the display rack for books on sale, many of which have men on the cover.
Me: “Why don’t you try looking over there?”
Daughter: “That’s it!”
She ran off. After she and her daughter picked out a book — a biography about a survivor on the Titanic — the mother explained to me that her son had a bookshelf full of biographies, many of which had their subjects on the cover.
At one point, her daughter must have noticed the pattern on her brother’s bookshelf! A few weeks later, the regular returned and mentioned to me that her son enjoyed the gift, though it was the last thing he had been expecting.
