There is a Strand Sucks website, and it bothers me not because it trashes the Strand but because it could be done so much better. For a while, I entertained the idea of creating a Strand Sucks webiste (seriously, with the same name) and was going to do it so much better, and so that's why I am mildly annoyed by the appearance of this one. It is done by some employee and everyone wants to know who, and I am running through the list of potentials in my head also, wondering which of my co-workers has this sense of humor, has Photoshop, and isn't too wordy.

The site has too many references to Nancy and Fred, the owners, people no one cares about or has anger towards beside the employees. The site should be geared toward a much broader audience, the NY book buying public. The ideas I had brainstormed for my site was advice on how to steal books, which ones aren't tagged. How to get books for cheaper if you are afraid of stealing: peeling off the labels of paberbacks and getting them for half-priced, or switching around stickers of books with similar titles. I was also going to have a guide of other bookstores to sell your books to, so that you would not be giving the Strand books for pennies that they would then mark up tenfold. I was going to try to get the big NY book bloggers to link to it: MobyLives and Maud Newton.

But more importantly, this was all going to be done with a purpose, with the message hammered again and again that the Strand workers were exploited and grossly underpaid and that these were tactics to bring attention to that. That is not being done on Strand Sucks, rather it is more of an adolescent slambook, demonizing authority figures. So I am just sad at the potential not utilized with this site, but I do still think it is funny, and that the boy is ballsy to tag the site's address in the employee bathroom and outside the Strand.

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Cold and wet: one of the worst combos ever.

Aimmee Mann on cold and wet days: excellent.

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The Princeton Review wrote me back to say that there aren't any full time openings but that I can still work there part time if I want. I am going to do that until the New Year, at which point if I am not in the circus, and if there is still part time work at the Princeton Review, I am going to quit the Strand and try to pick up enough shifts at PR to survive. Three shifts there equals a week at the Strand, so I think I can do this easily.