I couldn’t deny it. The kid was baked.<\/p>\n
Two guys walked in the store and made a bee-line to the 8-bit Nintendo dump bin. The taller of the two, the one wearing sunglasses, said that he needed some games for a party they were holding tonight. He asked how the games were priced–it depends–and started leafing through the bin.<\/p>\n
His friend picked a game out of the bin, held it close to his face, and studied it. Then he turned to me.<\/p>\n
“These games,” he said, his words drawn out, his enunciation drawn, “can you make us a deal on them?” Minutes seemed to pass as he tried to put his sentence across.<\/p>\n
I shook my head. “They’re priced as marked. I can’t offer you a sale on them, no.” And why did my head suddenly start to pound?<\/p>\n
And then I knew. The kid was stoned. He reeked of weed.<\/p>\n
His friend knew it, too. “Dude,” he said, “don’t say a word. It’s okay.”<\/p>\n
“But you don’t sell these old games,” the stoner said. “They don’t move, there’s no turnover, but if you make us a deal we’ll buy up a lot because we need them really bad.”<\/p>\n
Please, I thought, please move away–you’re giving me a migraine just standing there.<\/p>\n
Finally his friend caught his attention. But he was gone, I could see it in his eyes.<\/p>\n
Baked.<\/p>\n
An hour later a kid called the store. We chatted aimiably for a few minutes, then he asked, “What’s new at the store.”<\/p>\n
“We’ve got a store project. We’re building a trebuchet.”<\/p>\n
He sounded bewildered. “What’s a trebuchet?”<\/p>\n
“It’s a medieval siege weapon. It’s a really fancy catapult.”<\/p>\n
“Why are you building that?” he asked.<\/p>\n
“When the Viking hordes descend on Raleigh, we’ll need a few trebuchets to fend them off and protect the city.”<\/p>\n
A pause. “Okay, then.”<\/p>\n
My sales associate could barely contain herself. I had explained why we were building the trebuchet in such a straight manner she couldn’t help but laugh.<\/p>\n
Snarky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I couldn’t deny it. The kid was baked. Two guys walked in the store and made a bee-line to the 8-bit Nintendo dump bin. The taller of the two, the one wearing sunglasses, said that he needed some games for a party they were holding tonight. He asked how the games were priced–it depends–and startedContinue reading “On Customers and Snarkiness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[228,934,4124],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-eb-games","tag-trebuchet","tag-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}