Cancelling a reading subscription is usually a three-minute job, and the only reason it takes longer is that the cancel button is never where you would put it. Start in your account settings, look for a section called Membership, Plan, or Billing, and the option is typically at the bottom of that page in smaller type than everything around it. If you subscribed through an app store, cancel there instead, because the service cannot end a subscription it did not start. Cancel at least a day before your renewal date, since most places bill overnight, and screenshot the confirmation screen before you close it. A confirmation email should follow within an hour. If it does not, you are probably still subscribed, and it is worth going back in to check.
That covers the general case. The questions below are the ones I have actually been getting, at the desk, in person, for nine weeks now, and I am answering them here so I can stop answering them out loud. I want to be clear that I am doing this on my own time. I have a lot to get through today.
There is no button. Cancellations are handled in the Ledger. The Ledger is the green book on the front desk with the water stain shaped like Ohio. You write your name on the next open line, then write CANCEL in the column to the right, and then I initial it. That is the entire process. It is fast. I do not know why people keep looking at me like I have said something wrong.
No. I have checked the billing records, which took most of Tuesday, because the billing records are also the Ledger. As far as I can tell nobody has ever been charged. I looked for a column with amounts in it and there is one, but the only entries are "1 mug (chipped)" and "seven dollars, from Randy, do not ask." I raised this with Doug and Doug said the revenue model was "the lake." I wrote that down. I am still working out what it means. I assume it is a finance term.
They stay where they are, which is your house. We do not have them. I have looked. The stacks here hold about four thousand books and every one of them has been here since 1997, and if one of them were yours you would know, because it would smell like this building, and this building smells like warm dust and a heating system that is trying its best.
Yes. Write PAUSE in the column instead of CANCEL. Eleven people have done this. None of them have come back to write RESUME. I have their names. I think about them more than I should. There is a woman named Pamela who paused on a Wednesday in July and I have started to worry that something happened to Pamela, though nothing has happened to Pamela, Pamela is just paused, that is what paused means.
Okay, this is the question I want to talk about, because I get it eleven or twelve times a day now and I do not think the people asking it understand how it sounds from my side of the desk.
You walk in. You say you want to cancel. I say, no problem, here is the Ledger. You look at the Ledger like it is a snake. You say you did this online. I say, we are online, this is the website, you are reading it. You say, "No, the real one." And then you hold up your phone and it is showing a little spinning circle, and you look at me like the spinning circle is my fault.
I am an intern. I have been here nine weeks. The internship was six weeks. Nobody has told me it is over and I do not want to ask, because if I ask, and it is over, then the last three weeks were something else, and I do not know what they were. I have a badge. It is a name tag Marigold wrote on a sticker and the sticker says INTERN and under that, in smaller pen, "(Randy's idea)." I have never met Randy. I have met Randy's handwriting, on notes that appear on my desk overnight, and the notes know things about the day before that nobody was in the building to see.
You will get a confirmation initial. It is the letter B, in pencil, next to your name, in the Ledger. If you want an email you can bring in a stamp and I will put your line of the Ledger in an envelope. I will not tear the page out. That is the rule. The rule is on a note. The note is in Randy's handwriting and it is the only note that has ever been underlined.
There is no renewal date. There is only the Ledger, and the Ledger does not have dates in it after 1997, because the date column stopped being filled in around page nine and nobody restarted it. So technically every cancellation in the book happened in 1997. Including yours, when you write it. I have tried adding today's date beside my initial, and the next morning the date is gone, erased, cleanly, and there is a note that says "we don't do that here" and it is not signed, and it does not need to be.
Doug is at the lake. Marigold is at the desk, but Marigold has not blinked since I got here and I am not certain she is available in the way you mean. I asked Marigold on my first day what my deliverables were and she looked at me for about a minute and then handed me the Ledger and said "the strangers." I thought that was a project name. I made a folder. The folder is full now.
I don't know.
I want to be a good intern. I have made a spreadsheet. It has columns for name, time of arrival, what they said, and what their phone was showing, and the phone column says "loading" four hundred and twelve times and "a little book with a gift bow on it" once, and I have no theory that connects those. They are all sure they are somewhere else. They are all sure they have an account. They all, when I hand them the Ledger, get a look on their face like they have walked into the wrong house and the family has set a place for them.
And here is the thing I cannot put in the spreadsheet. The Ledger has their names in it already. Not all of them. Enough. A woman came in last Thursday to cancel and I flipped to a fresh page and there she was, three pages back, in handwriting I did not recognize, with CANCEL already beside it and an initial that was not mine, and the initial was R. She said she had never been here. I believe her. I also believe the Ledger. I have not found a way to believe both at once, so I go back and forth, hourly, and that is a lot of what my day is now.
Buy a book. There is a shelf by the door and the prices are on masking tape. I am not supposed to push, but authors are fragile organisms, the note on the shelf says so, and the note is underlined, so it is the other rule. It is the only thing anyone has asked me to do that I fully understand.
And if you did want to go further than cancelling, the whole account-removal procedure is in how to delete your Booktrovert account, and if you are somehow owed money, which I have not seen happen but the Ledger has a column for it, that is covered in how to get a Booktrovert refund. I wrote neither of those. I found them. They were on my desk one morning, printed, with a sticky note that said "for the strangers," and I have stopped asking who prints things here.
I am going to eat my sandwich now. It is 3:40. Please write legibly.
Diligently,
Booktrovert #685