Musings about Radio Shack...

Yep, so yesterday was my last day at Radio Shack... As a part-time job it was pretty good to me.. The amount of work I needed to do there was laughable... I didnt even have to try to sell anything, I scoffed at the extended warranties, the commission was a joke. I saved all the brainpower for the art I'd do after work... Most of my co-workers were cool, aside from a few jackasses. I'll miss those guys some.. It was fun telling the one guy everyone hates that no one liked him, he had no idea I didnt like him. The day I told my boss that I was quitting to go work in concept art, my boss even went so far as to tell him I was quitting because I hated him so much! That ruined his day, and I'm glad it did..
Working in retail in the neighborhood I did, you encounter a lot of people that are just 'off'.. Tweakers, thieves, old hippies that hate technology yet they have to buy our products, old folks that have no business going outside of their retirement community, wierdos, junkies, mentally disabled, physically disabled people, and more wierdos.. I got plenty of stories but the one that sticks out in my mind the most was this one woman.

If anyone knows sonoma county very well, you know that outside of the larger suburban whitebread cities, all the other towns around it are havens for hippies and other people who live left of the political scale, along with other "crazies".. This lady comes in interested in cell phones but doesnt know anything about using one. She was looking for a phone with big numbers because she "lost some feeling in her fingers because of gangrene.."
She insisted that we get her a cup of water and a place to sit down. So as my coworker is explaining to her about the cell phones, she could not shut up, going on and on about these crazy tangents, about how her boyfriend was abusing her mentally by smoking too much weed, about how she doenst know if she's gonna keep her house in Forestville; she had a story about everything, she owned, what it meant to her spiritually(She was half Pomo Indian and a Christian, apparently). My partner was just trying to sell her a phone and she wants to dump her life story on us all.
It gets wierder. I was helping this spanish-speaking customer with something, and she starts trying to speaking to him in Spanish. She asked if he was Mexican, he said no, he was Salvadorean (as it said on his embroidered wallet). She went on to say that Mexican men dont treat their women right, and that if he wanted her he'd have to treat her right. She was saying all this in perfectly-broken spanish. Poor guy just wanted to pay his cell phone bill.
So my co-worker finally got her to settle on a phone, finishing the transaction finally. Now, the hard part was teaching her to actually use it, and she was just not getting it, but we managed to show her the basics. She was so happy that we gave her good service that she said if the manager was here she'd make him take us out to lunch. She even wanted to write a letter to him. We thought it was going to be something about her thanking us, instead it went something like this:
"To the manager,
Tell Radio Shack that if we had guys like this in Israel then there would be World War 3."
We had to pin that one up on the bulletin board.
She's finally about to leave, but not before wanting to take all of our cardboard boxes with her. So she rounds up all of our cardboard boxes and takes em outside in front of our door, but only loads about 4 of them into her truck. She also walked around our parking lot picking the flowers out of the "garden" in between the parking spaces. She gets in her truck and is halfway out of our lot, but then turns around and comes walking back into our store. She asked if she left her phone in the store. We tell her no, she took it with her. She is sure she left the phone inside the store, so we look around, but obviously dont find it. She literally lost her phone 5 minutes after she bought it! She's looking around for the phone all over the place, goes into her truck, looks around there for a while. Still cant find it. She's insisting she left it in here. We tell her we'll call the cell number, and follow the ring. So we call it, but we dont hear a ring anywhere in the store. We tell her to go back to the truck and we'll call the number again. She does, and we call it... Surprise! The phone was in between the seat and the armrest!
So she comes back in to thank us for finding her phone. (Oh My God Just Leave Already) She goes back to her truck, gets inside, rummages in there for a while, gets out and starts walking toward our store. What does she want now?? She has a CD in her hand. Its a Neil Diamond CD. She tells us that as a gift, she'll let us borrow it, and to listen to track 12 because "it will change our life," and that it will make us believe in God.
After that, she finally pulls out to leave. A few minutes later we get a call from.....guess who?? She wanted to know how to do something like checking her messages or something. I dunno, but it was something we explained to her and she somehow forgot. We tell her something, and she hangs up. She calls again, with another stupid question. My partner tells her to press some code on her phone, which essentially turns off the phone. She doesn't call again.

Do you think that was the end of her? No! We see her again, about 3 months later. This was way after the guy that sold her the phone quit to go back to school. We had a new assistant manager by then.. She comes in mad because her cell phone bill was huge.. She owed a $400 bill or something. Her story was that she had another phone that we were supposed to shut off before getting this new one. First off, she made no mention of this when she bought the phone, second of all, she was the one with the responsibility to do so. So the assistant manager was trying to explain this all to her, but he was feeling shitty from earlier in the day. She tells him that he's got a "real negative vibe coming off of him". He tells her that he's got a headache. Oh, she's got a remedy for him. She comes back with a pill and a rose that she said she picked from the carl's jr. garden. She tells him to take the pill and eat the rose! Naturally he doesnt. When she left we threw the rose outside the store, and threw the pill in the puddle in front of the garden to see if any of the birds bathing are affected by it. Of course she has more stories; she tells us about how she married the Pomo Indian chief. Whether this was the boyfriend who smokes too much weed or not, I didnt wanna know. After all that she finally leaves, but not without taking our cardboard boxes with her....