Continuing our discussion about overly entitled salesmen
Fed up with my neverending search for furniture, on Saturday I went to an upscale leather furniture store on Seattle's eastside. I'll eventually start hemorrhaging money just to make a nuisance problem go away, and I knew I was nearing that point.
I walked into the store and had to step around a cluster of salesmen and customers and a homeless person that were clogging the entrance. That suited me. No humping salesman to shake off my leg. I headed off to the side.
"WHAT CAN I HELP YOU FOLKS FIND TODAY?" I heard someone bellow behind me. Noting the plural, I continued to walk. Then I heard a large person hustling behind me, trying to catch up.
"WHAT CAN I HELP YOU FIND?" he yelled at my back, now much closer. I turned around. It was the homeless person. Rather, it was what I'd thought was a homeless person but is really just "shabby yeti chic."
My hackles were already up. I don't like being screamed at, least of all by yetis bearing down on me.
"I'm fine, thanks. Just browsing," I said, turning around and continuing to walk away.
"WHAT ARE YOU SPECIFICALLY LOOKING FOR?"
I turned around again and snapped "Not a relationship."
"NOT A RELATIONSHIP? I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!"
Of this, I had no doubt. "It means I wish to be left alone."
Thus did this propel him into a rambling, monosyllabic bitchfest about my rudeness, about how he wasn't looking for relationships, about how he owned this store and was trying for a "sense of community" that apparently is somehow different from looking for relationships, and about how I shouldn't take my bad day out on other people.
A bad day? I thought I'd had a marvelous day, filled with pink sunrises and ferry orcas. Until 30 seconds earlier, anyway.
I tried to reason with him. "Do you not pay attention to body language? I walked away from you."
"THERE WAS NO BODY LANGUAGE."
Ah. So there's the problem. How liberating it must be to traipse through life free from the intellectual constraints of self-awareness.
Now let's examine just how excruciatingly bad he is at his chosen profession. I had just embarked on a five hour round-trip involving two ferry rides, just to give him giant stacks of money. I was even prepared to overpay him just so I could stop shopping. I was, in short, as motivated a buyer as buyers come. Poised to buy. Desperate to buy. Yet he managed to repel me out of his store within 30 seconds of my arrival. Put another way, I was in his store 1 second for every 10 minutes I had invested in giving him a sale.
That's immortal.
I obviously looked him up when I got home. He looked pretty much like in the photo, except that his hair and beard flew out in every direction, as if suspended in mid-explosion. Tidbits:
On his Facebook, he describes himself as an ageless sex god.
The man who so stridently defended his community from me actually lives in an entirely different community from that of the strip-mall furniture store.
Although he is indeed the owner of the store, it was with the help of a federal business loan. As a stockholder, I would very much like him to stop chasing off customers.