501 Are You Asking For A Challenge?

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This kind of thing happens all the time in retail.  Doesn’t matter what you sell, someone will come in wanting something, yet completely unable to tell you what it is.  In those moments you become a cross between a detective and a mind reader, and God help you if you are unable to untangle the mystery of the stupid customer.  I’d almost forgotten about it but I watched it happen while out and about.  A flood of suppressed memories washed over me in that moment. 

 As I had a little break in the story I just dropped in some Nina for her fans to enjoy.  The guy looks familiar, but I can’t place who it is he looks like. 

I had a dream that was, essentially, Billy Madison combined with Back To The Future.  You’d think that would be a pretty fun dream, but it was not.  Not at all.  I spent the whole dream frustrated and angry about how little sense everything made, yet unable to realize I was dreaming until the very end.  The only upside of the dream was that I had a super hot friend, a female, that I made no attempt to seduce.  Apparently in the dream I was still an idiot…

24 Comments

Oh, he must be talking about Bernard the Talking Duck.

A tragic tale of a talking duck and his struggle between being rejected by people for being a duck, and ducks for not making obnoxious enough sounds when they get too close.

hmm, I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately, none of them making sense, and one where I watched my self die in third person. I should stop playing games for a bit huh.

I either remember 5 seconds of my dream or nothing, which really sucks because I would love to have a projector in my head that I could replay my dreams over and over again.

This definitely brought back a flood of memories of my days working retail that I was trying desperately to bury deep within my memory. The best part of this kind of customer, is if you don’t somehow figure out what it is they want, most of the time they curse you out for being bad at your job. But since my job was customer service and not “store mind reader” I didn’t take it too personally..

I have done this. With a book, no less. I walked in with nothing more than a vague plot summary and the fact that the (female) author was Australian. The clerk at the counter WAS psychic, I think, because he found it after a couple of minutes of searching. I was incredibly impressed.

That guy looks like me, exept for the eyes everything is fairly spot on… oh and he’s a digital picture. Off to the beach!

Book with a talking duck… Why’d she stop there? Kid’s book, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, what?

As for dreams, if I want to remember it, I’ll grab a notebook by my bed and write it down before I forget. I can also usually tell when I’m dreaming, as it usually has a very “Matrix” feel to it, if I’m running but not getting anywhere, I’m talking to someone while something very bizarre is going on in general, or what I’m seeing is interrupted by a quick video game jaunt and is treated as a replacement visual for what’s going on. The worst one I had was back when I was a Boy Scout camping out at Philmont. After a day of hiking, setting up a tent, and going to sleep, I dreamt that I basically relived the day. Needless to say, I felt very tired after waking up. I’ve also never had those “fake wake-ups” that they show on TV & movies, I know when I’m awake and when I’m not.

Ugh, shivers ran over my, my eyes glazed over, and I couldn’t help, but remember an old woman once. I was working at the electronics counter at the local KMart, and she walked up to me, perfectly fine, and told me to empty a cart that was sitting beside the counter, not asked, but told, I smiled politely at her and told her that I couldn’t give her the cart, but that I could call up to the front of the store and have someone bring one back to her. She told me to just dump out the trash and give her that one, because he knees were shaking. I again repeated that it would only take a second to have someone from the front bring her a clean cart, and she told me that if she were my boss she would have fired me, and I smiled, and told her that it was a good thing she wasn’t my boss then. And then she stormed off. I was so angry. Little hag, just wanted to be difficult, why do people find joy in making other peoples lives difficult?

That is really annoying when working in retail. I worked in a bookstore for 8 months and if YOU couldnt figure out the book with a penguin on the cover for the customer, God help you. People were really picky, but I liked the ones that didn’t blame the store for their retardedness. hehe

This literally happened to me in a bookstore in Toronto in 1968. The customer was looking for a book with a green cover during WWII (before I was born) and it was either about France or by a Frenchman. Luckily he was not the rude and cursing type, also not much of a reader. He didn’t quite realize how many books were published each month, let alone each year about France or by Frenchmen, and about 20% of them had green covers (80% of hardcover books have either red, blue, black, or green covers. all other colors account count for the other 29%.) The entire staff had a good laugh about that.
Ironically, many times people can give the barest description, even being WRONG about certain details they give you, and you still can complete the gestalt and locate the book they mean.

Now see I actually got this all the time at the bookstore i used to work at and sadly I could always find the book. I pretty much had the whole store memorized.

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