Karim and I were chatting as we were exiting the National Bookstore Tuesday night when suddenly we were accosted by the guard. Karim was asked to open my bag, which he was carrying, and so obediently, we went back inside to blindly obey the surprisal of the uniformed man. The man in white then pointed at something inside my bag so Karim took it out, looked at it, looked at me, looked at the guard and said: What’s the problem with this? There it was, a brand new copy of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. It still had its tag and I could tell the guard’s suspicion was spiked with utter excitement. A-hah! I could almost hear him say it inside his head. Thieves.
“We need to check this,” the guard told us.
“Why?,” we answered in unison.
The guard looked at the book again seemingly confused about what to tell us.
“What is this?,” he asked.
“That…is…a…book,” I answered with infuriation that quickly found its way to my head.
He approached the clerks at the counter holding The Secret, showed it to them and asked what he was supposed to do. A second guard was then brought in and this was my angriest three minutes in a very long time. You know how it is when the dumbest of the lot don a uniform and deal with situations in vicious machination that make them look more stupid than they already do?
Guard Number Two, like the usually unnoticed Mini Me, sprung out of nowhere and in the most Erap-like voice he could muster said, “You know this is a bookstore and there are a lot of books here (one, we would rather just have wandered off to Alice’s Freudian wonderland and not get bothered by guards, and two, adults like us would know damn well if we had rolled into a bookstore or a butcher’s shop to be reminded atrociously). You should have told us you had this in your bag so this would not have happened.” I told him, irate now, that it’s not all the time when you consciously think about everything that is in your bag before entering a shop. Not with my bag especially because I have an entire house stashed inside it. I also reminded him to treat customers the right way especially that we did not do anything wrong and that I could make very serious complaints about him with the proper authorities (namely my mother-in-law and my very protective son). I must have scared that guard because he shut up and a third guard was dragged into the conversation and Guard Number Two was made to leave.
The third and the last guard that came to speak to us was in a barong, and was very professional in his approach. He smiled and curtly apologized that the cark had to happen and explained that he would take care of everything.
While all of this was happening, imagine how Karim (who has braved insurrectionists in the Southwestern part of the country) was reacting to the disquiet. I was trying so hard to control my temper while also praying he wouldn’t blow his top off. Nobody would like that one bit. Trust me.
I breathed deeply and politely told the god-guard that there must be a way for them to know that the book isn’t stolen from them. An exit scan or whatever it is called, I insisted. He excused himself with the book and returned a couple of minutes later profusely apologizing for the confusion.
Amidst the blood-rushing and embarrassing situation, both Karim and I agreed that the head guard deserved a compliment because of how he handled the situation and how he bumped off the rude guard from the scene.
We accepted the apologies with open arms from the other guard as well and triumphantly left the bookstore.
An hour and forty-minutes earlier, I was in a hurry to leave the office and threw The Secret inside my bag. The publisher bought the book for my review. Excited to meet Karim and get an overload of ice cream, I completely forgot that the book inside my bag was brand new. Normally, the bookstore would have scanned all books that have already been paid for. Unfortunately, they missed one and it had to be my book among thousands of them. Tough luck.
Life situations like this are easy to toss to the humor bin. We did and since I always carry a book around with me, I make sure the book is un-tagged and personalized so there will be no alarms going off anymore when we pass through them.
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