You know how they have that invisible leash thang for dogs, right?

[Deja Q]

What if they made it for people?

:shrug:

[jmowreader]

1. They do

Remember the box under Bush's jacket at the debates?

I got the best Invisible Fence story ever. A family came to the store and bought one of these.

In case you've never seen one, the Invisible Fence system has two parts--a collar the dog wears, and a radio transmitter. If the dog either comes too close to the transmitter (in the case of a wired system) or gets too far from it (on the wireless one), the dog gets shocked and, because you've taught the dog to turn around and go back the way it came if it gets shocked, the dog stays inside the boundary. From this description it should be fairly obvious that the only way this device will do anything is if every dog who comes near it has a collar on.

Well, it wasn't obvious at all to these people, because about three weeks later the woman came in screaming about how we were selling defective products and she was going to sue us for causing obvious harm to her family. These people took their in-heat dog, put a radio collar on her and put her out in the yard...and in the first twenty minutes she mated three times. So...now it's my problem that her $750 registered cocker spaniel (the manager counted--she told us the price and breed of this dog at least fifteen times in twenty minutes of screaming) had a bellyful of mutt puppies and she had to delay her breeding program until the dog had recovered from the trauma of pregnancy.

There really are people this stupid. Why can't any of them go to Lowe's?

[Richard Steele]

2. You really have some of the best 'stupid customer' stories!

[jmowreader]

4. I'm just scratching the surface

I only like to post the entertaining ones, and most of them aren't.

Like this moran: Yesterday I was out where I keep the fence pickets, putting up the new sign boards I'd made. This fucknuts customer walked up and asked how much the pickets are. Ninety-nine cents, I tell him, they're in the sale flyer. (Unfortunately, the department that makes the sale flyers is NOT the department that calls the company who makes the shit and asks them to send more--we've been out of pickets for three days.) "Isn't there a law that says you have to match prices plus give an additional ten percent?" No there's not a LAW, but we do it for competitive reasons. "And doesn't Lowe's have the same law?" Yes, Lowe's does the same thing. So the fucker called Lowe's and screamed at them for fifteen minutes that they HAD to give him our price plus ten percent because we didn't have enough pickets for him. (It gets better. Our policy reads "like to like"--if you find a better price on pickets that are 5/8" thick, 5-1/2" wide and 6' long, we match that. Lowe's matches on "exact item"--if you find a better price on that picket that was made by Shenandoah Wood Preservers, they match that. But if you bring in a 99-cent price on a picket from Universal Forest Products or Spartanburg Forest Products, they won't match it. They're so nit-picky they actually call us up and ask us to read them UPC strings off the item in question. When it comes to price matching, not even Wal-Mart is as fussy as Lowe's. And unfortunately for the customer, the only two stores in Fayetteville that buy anything from Shenandoah Wood Preservers are the two Lowe's.)

Or all the morans who try to "price match" on shit I don't even sell. One particularly bad example is vertical hardboard siding. I don't sell it. I'm glad I don't sell it because it's total crap. But it's popular because it sells for $14 per sheet and the cheapest thing I've got is $20. (I have OSB siding for $20, James Hardie siding for $22 and plywood siding for $28. Given that set of choices, always pick the James Hardie. It's the best.) Lowe's has it, but very few people like shopping at Lowe's because Lowe's' employees are dumber than freepers. Anyway, the customers will come in asking for Masonite vertical siding. I tell them to go to Lowe's. "I don't like to go to Lowe's. Can't you sell me the SmartSiding at the same price they want for Masonite?"

We have at least ten people a week who want to buy framing nailers. I ask them if they have air compressors. "No. Why would I need that?" Nailers run on compressed air.

In October we'll start getting the people who want male-to-male adapters for their Christmas lights because they put the second string of lights on the tree with the female plug pointing right at the female plug for the first string. Uhh...didn't you NOTICE this?

We rent tools, among them chainsaws. This guy rented one for three days. If you run a chainsaw for three days you'll use a couple gallons of gas at least, and you mix 2-stroke oil with chainsaw gas. Guy goes home with our chainsaw, runs it out of gas, puts some fuel in it and runs it until the engine seized. Two-stroke oil does many things to gas, and one of them is to turn it green. Anyway, the guy comes in with this seized-up chainsaw. The first thing our guy did was to look at the gas. It wasn't green. "Did you put oil in the gas?" 'Yes.' "What kind of oil?" 'Havoline!'

Every so often we get someone who tried to use a foam sheathing board as a structural element and fell through. The shit says right on it, "this is not a structural element."

A guy came in to get a pallet of shingles. He was driving a Ford Ranger. I told him I wasn't going to load a whole pallet of shingles into the back of a Ranger. He started screaming. (Screaming, as you will undoubtedly have noticed, is the standard reaction among my customer base when they're told they can't do something.) "WHY THE FUCK WON'T YOU DO THIS? I'LL HAVE YOUR JOB!" Because a full pallet of shingles weighs 4400 pounds and a Ranger weighs 1900, I told the man, and a Ranger simply can't handle that much weight. You'll break the truck if you try it. (We rent a Ford F-350 for $20 per hour. You can't put a full pallet of shingles in that, either, and it's a far more robust truck than a Ranger.) The guy demanded that I put them on. Oh-kay...I picked up the shingles. I positioned them over the guy's truck. I lowered them down until they touched the bed. He's all "see? I knew it could take them. You just don't know what you're doing." I lowered them another nine inches. The springs compressed as far as they would and the tires squished down to half their normal sidewall height. "WHAT THE FUCK YOU DOIN, MAN? YOU TRYIN' TO BREAK MY MO'FUCKIN TRUCK?" I looked at the guy and told him that if I dropped the load another six inches, I might be able to get enough load off my machine to get the forks out...or the shingles might just fold the truck in half. He suddenly realized WHY I wouldn't load a whole pallet of shingles into the back of a Ranger. We handloaded the shingles into his truck. It took him five trips to get them home safely.

We've got lots of soldiers in town who are stationed at other places. One of them came in last weekend to buy a deck. "Can you have this delivered?" Certainly, where to? "Killeen, Texas." This guy I could actually help. Home Depot has a very good store-to-store voice-over-IP system. I made two calls. First, I worked up the deck package. Then I called Home Depot of Killeen and got someone to get me SKUs and prices for every piece of the deck, plus their delivery fee--and handbuilt a price list. He was happy, so I called Killeen back up, gave them an order over the phone (for some strange reason, only managers have e-mail accounts at HD) and faxed them the delivery paperwork. He used his Home Depot credit card to pay, and he should have all his stuff by now.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989...seventeen years later, people apparently WANT to live behind walls. This explains all the fucking privacy fence I sell. You want to know what the biggest complaint about the fence we sell is? "You can see through it." There are gaps between the pickets that are about the thickness of a sheet of the paper Kenneth Blackwell demands Ohio voter registration cards be printed on, but apparently that's not enough privacy for them.

[Dangerously Amused]

3. Dude, you didn't sell them the matching chastity belt??

OMG, what stupid people! Not just, "let's put our in-heat pedigreed dog outside unattended," but "let's put our in-heat pedigreed dog outside unattended, in a situation where she couldn't escape sex with horny male mutt dogs even if she wanted to!"


I would love to see them try to sue. My god, they would instantly become the laughing stock of product defects litigation. That ranks right up there with the McDonald's coffee case.


Thanks for the laugh.


:)

[jmowreader]

5. The McDonalds coffee case was justified

The facts of that case: The McDonalds in question was not selling coffee. They were melting steel and dyeing it black.

(Okay, seriously: This McDonalds' coffee was being sold at 185 degrees F because they didn't want to wash out the machine at night. Her lawyers went to every restaurant in the area of this McDonalds and measured the coffee temperature; none were higher than 165 except the McDonalds.)

The plaintiff in that case, one Stella Liebeck, bought a cup of the molten steel. While her son was driving, she put the cup of steel between her legs so she could pry the lid off and add the alloying agents "cream" and "sugar" to it. The steel slopped out of the cup onto her legs and caused third-degree burns to her nether regions.

In the suit, her lawyers asked for McDonalds to pay Ms. Liebeck two days' coffee profits and to turn down the temperature of their coffee to 165--which is plenty hot. The jury awarded her the multimillion-dollar award. She didn't ask for it and, when all was said and done, she didn't get it either. On appeal the award was cut to...well, two days' coffee profits.

There have GOT to be better "out of control legal system" cases than Liebeck v. McDonalds. Let's see...oh...how about Bush v. Gore?

[Midlodemocrat]

6. What a moran. That is why I didn't get one of those type fences.

I was concerned that my little 14 pound dog would be a 'sitting duck'.

WHen she was 6 months old, she was scheduled to be spayed and as luck would have it, she went into heat that same week. We didn't notice right away because she was outside playing with the kids in the (fenced) backyard, but a male Newfoundland showed up and was going ballistic.

Imagine if he had gotten to her? She weighed all of 8 pounds at the time. (She's a dachshund)

I never found out who owned that dog because I have never seen it since, but my poor kids went berserk trying to grab the puppy and get it inside. You never heard such screaming.