I Wish I Had An Idea-Hammer...

...which i could use to physically drive information into the brain of a customer.

Consider today. He needs a certain cable. This certain cable will not work properly if run for a length of over three metres. Sadly he needs at least six, preferably ten. Fair enough, but tough luck unfortunately. I offer the altenative solutions, but they aren' adequate. At this point, normal people accept the fact that what they want simply isn't possible, and perhaps retire to think about other ways around the problem, or ways to use the solutions i've offered.
Of course some people aren't that simple. They repeatedly insist that they need it to be longer, as though coninued repetition alters reality. They also repeatedly offer the concept of joining two cables together. Each time i explain that doing such a thing really doesn't alter the nature of the problem. That signal still needs to travel the length of the cable. Still, i can understand the mistake the first time, but fifteen minutes and thirty repetitions later, It's starting to wear thin. I eventually failed. One imagines he'll be back to return the extra cable and the coupler tomorrow.

Secondly, it never ceases to amaze me that someone can tell me over and over again how much of a hurry they're in, jiggle around impatiently, and still manage to dither around and waste quarter an hour of my time. They'll happily arse around for ages reading the small print on the side of a box, then comparing it to the small print of a different box, and obsess over a tiny detail nobody ever cared about, yet then fidget around restlessly and moan when it takes more than five seconds to print a reciept.

Lastly, it amazes me that a customer can come in, and give me the tiniest possible information about the product he seeks. When this proves to be too little information to act on, he gets annoyed and wants to talk to someone else. When he gets to the next memeber of staff, he magically comes up with much more detail on what he wants. When this still turns out not to be enough, or that we dont do exactly what he needs, he wants to talk to yet another person. When this person arrives, he suddenly changes the details altogether, asks for a completely different product, finds and gets what he needs, and sneers at the first two staff member as though they were idiots. This might be some strange superiority fettish, but I haven't managed to secure confirmation yet.