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The bookshop is one of my longer established clients. If you visit the Pitstop web site (click here), most of the brief descriptions of new books were prepared by me.

However, it was not to prepare book descriptions that I was attending the bookshop from 9 'til 5 for three weeks. I was selling tickets.

Each year The Pitstop Bookshop pre-sells tickets to the WA round of the Australian V8 Supercars Series. In the three weeks leading up to the race meeting, the number of telephone enquiries is enormous. Peter Lyster, the proprietor of the bookshop, asked me to help field the telephone calls; hence my three weeks of full time work.

Orders for tickets come in mainly by telephone or from the Pitstop web site, with a few mail orders. Thousands of tickets are also sold over the counter. My job was to process orders that had come over the web or been received by others over the telephone. I also had to field telephone calls, which were not all for tickets.

As the weekend of the races came closer, we had more and more callers asking for ticket prices and where they could be bought. The Pitstop Bookshop sold general admission tickets, paddock passes and grandstand tickets. Two agencies at suburban shopping centres made cash sales of general admission tickets and paddock passes.

In the last two days, when it was too late to send tickets out by mail, we spent most of our time directing customers to the agencies, explaining where the bookshop is located and explaining that tickets cost $5 more if bought "at the gate".

I received and processed orders for innumerable tickets plus books and DVDs that are the bookshop's main stock in trade. Workshop manuals are among the biggest selling items in the shop and I answered enquiries about workshop manuals for a wide variety of vehicles ranging from a Toyota bus to a Gilera motor scooter.

The bus and the scooter were two of the very few requirements that we could not meet, either from stock or by ordering a manual from the bookshop's regular suppliers. There is a steady stream of workshop manuals leaving the shop by mail or overnight courier to all parts of Australia.

It was three weeks of long hours, working early mornings, evenings and weekends to keep my business ticking over while spending eight hours a day at the bookshop, but I enjoyed helping hundreds of people to obtain the tickets, books and DVDs they wanted.

In case you wondered what selling tickets, books and DVDs has to do with being a freelance writer, it is all part of that PLUS on the end of my job description.