Last customer of the day, some 45-50 year old guy, kinda tall. I knew there was something a little off about him. Anyways, he wanted universal remotes, so I pointed to the appropriate aisle, and told him about how far down the aisle it was. He walks to the wrong side of the department...no way he could have misunderstood that by pointing left, I really meant that he should walk to the otherside of me and go right. I find that a lot of people do this when they want to be lead to the correct place, and since we are really supposed to do that anyways...reguardless of whether we are working over already, I led him there.
He began to go on at length about how he just got a Dish system, he can't use his remote for the Dish, and this guy (who I am not sure if he installed the Dish, setup the guys TV and stuff, or is just some random person recommending remotes) recommended a particular brand of remotes that began with an "s" or "sh" sound. He looked at most of the remotes, setting them on the base after looking at them. The whole time he was bouncing between telling me stories, asking if the remote selection in front of him are the only remotes (me saying yes everytime), and him setting things in the wrong place.
Finally, he came across the remote that he already owned, and RCA universal remote that he got with he TV. This of course offended him. He could not understand why he could not get it to work with his set up, and we should not lie and say it works with other stuff cause it doesn't, and why doesn't it, and yada yada... Finally, I asked it he had the instruction book for the remote, cause they don't "just work" you have to program them...so he told me a story about how he moved, and he put stuff in boxes, and how he took stuff out of boxes. I assumed he meant to say something about how he lost it in the move, but he never mentioned anything specific in the story. It really was just that he moved, he had put stuff into boxes, and he had taken stuff out of boxes.
So I reitterated the fact that the reason why he could not get it working was because of the lack of a code book. So he started talking about how he was going to mail the company and ask them to send him a new one (good idea, chief). While telling me this story, he started putting back the remotes he had been playing with. He was putting an obscene amount of effort into looking at the UPCs of the product and the pegs he was putting them on, and comparing to the product on the peg. At first I was stunned that he was actually going to put everything back and not just leave it on the base, but then, after about the third one he put back, I realized that he was putting them back on the wrong pegs. Different brand/shape/color/function remotes he was putting all back on the wrong pegs... and he was putting so much effort forth to get them on the pegs...
Ok, so the guy starts to walk away and then turns back, and starts telling me another story. This time it was about how every company in the world has a toll free number, except RCA. See, he had this TV, and all of the sudden, the sound stopped coming out of it. So, he started trying to call RCA, but he couldn't reach them, cause they did not have a toll free number (I assume he meant that he was not going to call a number he was going to get charged for, but he kept phrasing it like only phone numbers that are free have people on the other end of them). Finally, he took it back to the people who he bought the TV from, they had a "Dealer Only" number (ok, now real quick, most people don't know this, but since I work in retail, I can fill you in, normally when we tell you it is a "Dealer Only" number, we looked for whatever product you bought and read it either from the outside of the package or from the instruction manual, but we tell you "Dealer Only" so you don't think we are implying that you are incapable of reading), and he called it.
This is where the guy went from kind of annoying, to really annoying and just plain stupid. I guess he had to call this number three or four times. He said they kept mentioning different things for him to try, and pushed him to different people, and finally, he got this woman. Story stops for a second as he catches his breath. ..."and this is what really pisses me off"... (Did not know he was pissed to begin with, but ok.) I guess all the people he had talked with before hand who could not help him, were all male. This person was female, and she fixed the problem. Something like, "Yeah, and she just flew in and had to save the day making all those guy who were smarter than her look stupid."
While I was trying to figure out how not solving his problem show how vastly smarter the guys were to the woman how did solve his problem...and how her fixing his problem was a bad thing, he segwayed into cop shows. "It is kinda like when you have a police department in New York with a black woman in charge..." Oh shit, I get it, he is sexist, no wait, he is sexist AND racist. "...The black woman is the most put down thing in existance, there is no way she would have the nerve to lead people." At this point, wearing a blank expression, rigid posture, no words. "Guess you can do anything in Hollywood." And he is nodding his head at me like he is waiting for me to agree, and I am staring at him, waiting for him to realize that he is an ass. After realizing that he was not just going to walk away, that I really could not either, and that we would be in this perpetual gridlock, I finally said something about how the world is made up of all kinds...and he left.
I stood there for a second, waiting for him to clear the aisle, and started to put all the remotes back on the correct pegs, checking the UPCs to see if there were any similarities to the ones on the packages and the ones on the pegs he put them on...no, none. It just kinda struck me as amusing that he had been bitching about how he hated it when women showed men up, cause they were obviously inferior, and he can not even put things back where he found them.
The whole thing has made me think about this though. I have decided that even though the statement "Women are dumber than men" is sexist, "There are more stupid women than stupid men" is not. My reasoning for this is simple and is derived from two statements (one which I feel is true, and one that IS true): an average woman is just a capable as the average man, and the world's population of women is greater than the world's population of men. So, if men and women are equal, but their numbers are not, then whichever has the higher population also has the higher number of people at the extremes. This thinking also leads to "There are more intelligent women than there are men."
