So yesterday I went down to Tottenham Court Road to try and buy an external hard drive. It was a quiet day, and I had money to spend[1], so you’d think it’d be easy to get served, but not so! I was ignored by so many salesmen, I started to wonder if I’d accidentally worn my ‘I love SARS’ t-shirt.
Not only that, but when I did get their attention, salesmen in two different stores told me they didn’t have what I was looking for, even though I could clearly see it on the shelf behind them.
When I pointed it out to them, one told me ‘we’re not selling them, because they’re broken’. I asked him why they were on display, and he said, ‘they don’t install properly’. When I asked him why they didn’t send them back to the [big name brand] manufacturer, he just stared at me.
The other said, ‘that’s not USB. It’s firewire’. I said, ‘yes it is, look, it says so on the box’. He said ‘no, it’s only firewire, the box is wrong’.
I’m not saying it’s a chick thing, but those shops would go out of business if they treated all their customers like that.
[1] At least, I had to spend money, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Deadpan cop of the week award courtesy of the Odd Spot: “New York police captured a one-metre-long alligator in a Queens park on Monday. A city parks spokesman said its presence was a sign of people’s tendency to abandon their exotic pets when “they realise they’re big enough to eat their child”.”

If you ever need to repair a corrupted Mozilla installation, start by deleting or renaming your profile files. For some reason, the instructions on fixing a broken application after a crash aren’t easy to find, but if you’re as addicted to tabbed browsing as I am, you might need them one day.