Ok, this morning I just happen to decide to visit a blog site I had started a long time ago and never really played with. The site was basically going to be me talking about stupid walmart happenings. Anyways, I kinda glanced at it, and then had to run to work. Then had two of the dumbest customers today.
I won't really mention the asshole. He is in screwing things up enough to where I am sure I will have plenty of opportunities to bitch about him in the future. The other one was just, well, misinformed. For some reason that I think I will never understand, people use the word 'modem' to talk about a computer. Now, (just in case any of my listeners out there think modem does mean computer, you are wrong) I have had people use this so many times that I have spent some time checking various online dictionaries just to make sure that it was not a depricated usage. The closest I have come is thinking about thin clients, but still, the computer is the computer, it just runs everything off of another machine.
Ok, now I did not have the opportunity to start this, or I would have finished it very quickly. A woman called it asking about monitors and modems. I guess she said that both of hers gave out on her, and she needed to replace them. Well, I would like to think that the girl who took the call knew better, and that she was just toying with the customer, but well, I never really know anymore. She gave this woman the prices of all the monitors we carried (120 to 500) and the prices of all of our modems (30-90). After some convinicing that yes, 30 was the low price on the modems, the conversation ended. The girl who took the call told me the conversation about an hour later, laughing about the situation.
About another hour or two pass, and this, well, typical Terre Haute Walmart customer comes in and starts asking about modems. Knowing what is about to happen, I take her over to the computer stuff and show her the shelf they are on. Quickly she starts makeing huge dresser size box motions with her hands and repeats the word 'modem' fairly slowly. Her husband is behind her, and from how he is behaving I can tell that he thinks this is funny, so I decide to keep playing. I point to the word 'modem' on each of the boxes and saying it slowly each time I point.
We play this game back and forth a couple of times until I see a hint of anger popping up in her eyes. After checking the husband again, who is not upset at all, but still very amused, so now I know that he knows the difference and has all along. This makes me assume that she knew the difference as well, this makes it fun. Now I know she was just trying to capitalize on a, uh, miscommunication. I quickly blurt out, "Oh, you mean an actualy computer, not just a modem. That makes so much more sense." Yeah, like I did not know. A damn monkey could have known what was going on by that point. She kept trying to tell me that the computer was a modem, and that the girl on the phone said we had them for $30.
Ok, no more boring details about the back and forth...cause I don't feel like typing that much. I basicaly finished it the same way I always finish these things, bouncing between pure information, and outer monologues about casual observations. Like, "...a modem is actually a small component in a computer that allows it to communicate through a serial connection to other computers, usually a dial-up connection to the internet. For some reason, people occasionally call computers modems because it is what they see as the most important part of it. It is kinda like refering to a car as your wheels, I guess. Hmmm, I wonder why people don't call computers videos cards, those actually do far more work that the modems do...". After a couple of those, each time making the reference the people in my monologues sound less tech savey, they will just drop whatever misconception they have and agree to whatever I say so that they don't sound like an idiot.
Finally, she buckled and gave up on the idea that she was goign to get a computer for $30. She also buckled on her story that the monitor and modem had gone out to begin with and let it slip that she had actually bought a couple of games and they just would not work on her computer and she was hoping to upgrade for cheap. The computer she had was a supposed to be a 386 machine that someone had somehow shoved Windows 95 on. Um, yeah, well...
She left with $500 computer, about $80 dollars worth of jewel case games, a new printer, paper, backup cartriges, a new desk, and some misc shit she picked up around the store.
$30 dollar computer my ass.
