NANCY & The Book Squirrel

“Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.”
-- Anatole France, 1922

For a brief time Nancy and I met in my office in Deveel Hall. Max Deveel, scion of a Porta Potty fortune, was a rabid Angel College booster who had been instrumental in luring Roderigo Dickson away from East Egg Tech, a perennial football power in the Mosquito Coast conference.

On this particular evening, there came a soft knock on the door. Given the unpredictability of Nancy’s psychotic moods, it wasn’t surprising then that she grabbed my arm with a look of bewildered terror. The knock came again, and as the last muffled rap fell on our ears, her mood quickly changed to anger. Her visage ominously morphed from panicky wildebeest to rapacious hyena. She couldn’t know that lurking behind that door was another bottom feeder in the halls of academe, the “book squirrel.” Now the book squirrel is the academic equivalent of street people who prowl the halls and auditoriums for empty bottles and cans. Similarly (a term Nancy stubbornly refused to believe was a word), the book squirrel moves from department to department, and office to office, in search of new textbooks (they must be the latest edition). The shelf life is short (about 1 year), and so the harvesting and sales must be quickly facilitated.

Not only are instructors solicited door to door, but also on line. Text book buyers, like vultures circling dead deer our nation’s highways, instinctively know when the major companies, like Norton, Bedford, and Prentice Hall, for example, will make their various stops on the college circuit.

The book peddlers typically arrive in the morning with boxes of brand spanking new books, as well as milk and cookies (gourmet sandwiches and pastries from the finest upscale caterers in the area they happen to be in) to encourage that first cautious perusal, which is invariably followed by a gorging frenzy in which the Professors, lecturers and teaching assistants load up on as many tomes as they can. This ‘loading up’ fosters the illusion of intellectual sophistication and professional seriousness, as well as provides salable commodities for instructors that live on the edge.

The ‘edge’ here specifically refers to the lot of those vagabond adjuncts whose meager subsistence salaries allow the subsidization of the important tenured research (on subjects like Victorian underwear as text, for example). They ensure that the important scholarly pursuits of top-notch academicians are not undermined by that mundane task of actually providing instruction to witless undergraduates.

He was a book squirrel all right, tall and wispy, with the gaunt, thin haired look of a character right out of “The Wind and the Willows.” Nancy looked at him like a Bull Mastiff ferociously guarding her territory (remember, dear reader, this was MY office).

“Whatta ya want,” she cackled.
“I’ll handle this, Nancy.”
“No you won’t, I’m paying you.”
“Good God, Nancy, some civility, please.”
Now, Mr. Rail-splitter, what can I do for you?”
“I’m a book buyer, kind sir, and I’m looking to buy any unused text books you might have.”
“Show us some I.D,” Nancy snarled.

With that, this meek, little man fled the scene without another word. On seeing this, Nancy turned to me with that Gila-Monster grin, and says, “you make your money with me pal, and if you try any other extracurricular funny stuff, I’ll cut your balls off.”

I mean, how to respond to this, this, this, Kathy Bates misery troll I now found myself working for?

I said, “Nancy, can you say ‘pepper spray’, because if you keep hiding my cell phone, monitoring my calls, acting like a baboon in estrus, chasing book squirrels, and generally behaving like a rabid goat, I’m going to have to take executive action.”

Upon hearing this, her Miss Piggy face and Twiggy eyes shot me a look so sad and forlorn that, suddenly, deep within me, I felt the slightest twinge of sympathy for this sad, cabbage patch creature.

But then it passed.