Dumbass Training Manual

This is sort of a follow on from yesterday’s post.

You see, my wonderful parents sent me a wad of cash for Christmas, and Sunny and I decided almost immediately that some of it should be spent on more memory for the computer.

(As a totally weird aside, do you think the computer feels like Superman after having a Kryptonite necklace removed? Think about it, it’s like going to sleep and waking up with double your brain power.)

Now, I have to say that the one thing I despise more than anything else is shopping for computers and computer components at retail stores. I was lucky enough in England to live a stone’s throw away from Europe’s biggest permanent computer fair. The people there were knowledgeable as a rule, and because they traded on word of mouth, you very rarely got screwed…because if you got screwed, word spread like wildfire, and they went out of business.

In retail stores, sales assistants (or associates, or whatever they’re called these days), come in one of two flavors.

Knowledgeable, but completely willing to screw you over to get that bonus for selling the obsolete, half-broken junk that’s been sitting on the shelves for years…or completely and totally clueless, but STILL try to blind you with science (“Uh, yeah, this one’s great, it’s got lots of frames per second and two twin cooling gigs”).

However, the thing I want to talk about today is something they must cover in basic sales assistant training class.

It’s called S.H.I.T., or Stupid Highly Irritating Talk.

You see, for some reason, they feel the need to come out with the most pointless and inane chatter possible.

For example, when I bought my printer from Staples, the sales clerk asked “Oh, these are good, you gonna use it to print stuff?”

No, you cretin I’m going to use it as a toaster. I like to eat hot bagels while I’m web-surfing. Either that, or I’m going to use the guts of it to build a doomsday device, and melt the casing into a fine piece of art and go for the booker prize.

Anyway, today I was in Staples, and was shocked to actually come across a normal sales person. I don’t mean normal as in “The same as all the other sales-people”, I mean, normal as in a normal human being.

“Excuse me.” I asked, bracing myself for the worst. “Can you tell me where the Desktop Memory is please?”

“Sure, over on that wall. The shelf underneath the laptops.”

I was stunned.

Not only did the guy give me this information without having to ask someone, get the rest of the staff over for a conference, or make me wait for 15 minutes while he thought about it…the Desktop Memory was exactly where he said it would be.

I started to sweat a little. I’d obviously crossed over into the bizarro world. The check out guy was going to pay me to take this stuff away, then I’d head outside where cars drive people.

So, browsing through the memory, I found the type I needed, and headed for the checkout.

The second sales clerk gave me a shit eating grin as I handed him my purchase.

He can’t say it. I thought. Please don’t say it.

“Memory huh?” He said as he put my half-gig stick of PC3400 DDR RAM into a bag. “Trying to speed up the computer a little, right?”

“No actually, I’m trying to make it as slow as possible, that’s why I’m buying a frigging upgrade because I want my computer to run as SLOWLY as possible.”

Alright, I didn’t say that, I actually said “Yeah.”

…but I SOOOO wanted to.