At the pawn shop, we realize that it is important to some of our customers that they are able to try out the used items which they are about to purchase. We also realize that there are some people who just want to mess around with some of our merchandise. And it seems to me that the most used yet least purchased items in the store are oure guitars. Many people will spend long periods of time rocking out on our showroom floor and then leave without purchasing so much as a thirty cent guitar pick. We had one such man walk through our doors today.
He was an elderly man, meaning that I suspected he was getting close to sixty, and looked like he'd been wearing the same hippie clothing since 1969. He was polite enough in person. He even offered some little-known trivia about the origins of a specific brand name of guitar pedal. But when I knelt down to an amp, and plugged in his guitar, he strummed away with all of his aging hippie might and nearly deafened me by blasting a throbbing cord right into my face. His politeness in conversation, clearly, did not carry over into providing the courtesy of letting me remove my eardrums away from the guitar amp before he started showing off his skills. He then proceeded to rock out at an inappropriate volume.
Having helped the man become situated for his jam session, I returned to a counter to help ring up customers and tried my best to ignore the aged hippie guitarist. I would say that I was doing fairly well at this. One customer that I served, however, did not have such advanced skills of ignoring annoying noises as I.
First, I helped the woman pay the interest on one of her loans. Second, I began to ring up the various items she wanted to purchase. During all of this, she kept muttering to herself about the volume of the guitar (which, in her defense, was too loud) and turning around to shoot evil glares at the man. She kept muttering things like "I can't even think" and "Please, hurry up" and "Get me out of here" and had great difficulty in performing simple tasks such as counting money because she was so frazzled by the noise. I'd seen this woman in the pawn shop before and thought she was weird, but what I'd previously witnessed was nothing to what I saw today. I legitimately feared that she about to lose it. Finally, after she had paid for her items and I handed them to her in a bag, she dropped the bag. She tried to pick her things up but only succeeded after fumbling with them for several seconds. The, muttering to herself that the guitar music was horrible, she thanked me and rushed from the store. Thank goodness she didn't have a gun on her, otherwise, the content of this post would be drastically different.
What was even more entertaining was when the man turned to a woman about his age and asked her "Where were you--what were you doing in the mid-70s?" as he continued to strum away on his guitar. The woman had no interest in talking to the man and quickly made her away across the store. If this bothered the man, he didn't show it and continued to play.
Eventually, the man approached me and asked if he could try out a specific pedal. I responded that he could and kindly hooked it up for him. Sadly, the pedal didn't work. We checked to see if it had a battery in it, which it did, so we assumed the battery was dead. "Do you know how to check to see if these are dead?" the man asked me. I wanted to say "Sir, of course I know how to check if a 9 volt battery is dead. Every first-grader in the planet knows how to check that. Give me a break." I, however, kept my comments to myself and watched the man as he demonstrated how to test it by licking the prongs. He then handed it to me with a cocky "Yep. It's dead." I carried the licked battery to the trash can, making sure to be careful that the ends didn't touch my skin (I really didn't want hippie saliva on me), and disposed of it. I had to hunt for another battery for a couple minutes, but finally succeeded only to find that this second one was also dead. The man conducted a second lick test and I carefully threw that one away as well. A third battery was found, suspected dead, licked, and then disposed of. And then, finally, the fourth battery worked.
At this point, the man tried to strike up a conversation with me about guitars as he played, keeping his eyes on me the entire time as it to prove that he was so talented that he didn't need to look at his fingers, but I ended the conversation by reminding him to play quietly so as not to disturb our other customers. The man grinned, leaned in close to me, and asked "Do I play too loud?" with such arrogance that it disgusted me. He played a little while longer and then left without buying a single thing. What a poor, old hippie, pretending he's a rock star while playing cheap guitars at a pawn shop and getting shot down by middle-aged women.
No comments:
Post a Comment