Macrolog
Fucking With Customers
Finally finished my eight-day stint at work. I dunno what to do with myself now.
I’m feeling a little guilty about messing with a customer’s head yesterday. He came in looking for, what he said at first, a hard disk. We don’t have those, I told him, whilst simultaneously wondering why someone would go to a music store to look for a hard disk. Then he said 3.5” disk, and it automatically clicked in my head that this guy knows fuck-all about computers. So I said ‘ah, you mean a floppy disk’ and the guy looked pretty perplexed (obviously he’d never learned that hard - non-floppy - plastic 3.5” disks are called ‘floppy’ because the term refers to the floppy, round magnetic disk within the plastic casing … I guess that’s where the ‘disk’ part comes from too). Then he started saying stuff about saving e-mails on them (which, well, definitely takes some explaining to do for a novice).
He was confusing himself with this talk, I could tell by just looking at him, but however much I was tempted to sit him down and give him a lecture in Computer Usage 101 (and put my three years of Information Studies to good use), that just isn’t in my job description. Besides, I was in a pissy mood anyway, it being my eighth day in a row stuck in there.
So I sold him a pack of floppy disks, and as I was handing him his change and receipt at the till, said to him that even though it says on the box that the disks are already formatted, he may have to reformat them to suit the needs of his particular operating system. As the words came out, I could almost see the cogs in his brain rusting. Boy did I feel clever! I actually revelled in his predicament. But now I feel bad. Should I? I mean, it’s not like I swore at him or insulted his mother or something. But I can’t help feeling just slightly remorseful.
Thu 06 Jun 2002 at 18:47 ·
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This is the personal website of MacDara Conroy, a twenty-something journalist, editor and all-round creative type living in Dublin, Ireland.
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You are reading Fucking With Customers, a Macrolog entry by MacDara Conroy. It is filed under Journal, and was published in June 2002.
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