...and these people wouldn't hire me.

Regular readers will know that a few weeks ago, I put in an application at my local Staples store.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I never got a call back.

Well, yesterday, Sunny and I went to run some errands. On the way home, we stopped at Staples to price Desktop memory and drool over the laptops.

Spotting a particular laptop, I looked at the sticker to check out the specs. All that was listed was the Hard drive size, memory and processor.

Then “Confused Looking Old Guy” stumbles over.

“Can I help you?” He asked.

“Yes please.” I said. “Can you tell me what sort of graphics hardware this laptop has?”

I saw the look of terror cross his face. Obviously I’d asked something that wasn’t covered by his 8 minutes of intensive training. He looked at the laptop, and looked momentarily relived.

“Ah! ATI!” He said, pointing at the sticker on the front of the laptop. He looked at me all smug, like he’d just laid down an ace. “Anything else?”

Wondering where he’d put his “I’m dumb” sign, I said.

“Errr, I mean how much memory? Clock speed? Chipset?”

The look of terror covered his face again, and he started working frantically at the laptop, randomly clicking and pushing buttons. I’d seen this dance before. Translated from performance art to plain English, it means:

I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and I’m hoping you know little enough about computers to not recognize this fact. I’ll keep doing this in the hope another staff member comes along and I can make my excuses and leave…if they don’t, I’ll make some shit up.

A few minutes passed and he finally gave up.

“Well,” he said, obviously in a flash of inspiration. “More than likely it shares the memory with system memory.”

“Yeah.” I said. “But how much?”

Finally, after another 5 minutes of him hammering keys on the laptop, I just had to say:

“Excuse me, mind if I look myself?”

I mean, come on people. Start, Control Panel, System.

How hard is that?