The Best Electronics Salesmen Have Lobster Claw Hands

I wrote previously how I went over to the dark side by purchasing an iPhone. I still like it a lot and am willing to overlook its many flaws because of how easy it is to use, listen to music and play games. And my wife, who is completely iJealous of it, squealed in delight this morning when the UPS guy hand delivered her very own Ipod Touch. Yeah, I bought it for her from the Apple store as a surprise, although I spent the money we had earmarked for a new Microwave oven on it. I guess we will have to panfry our food a while longer.

But as part of going over to the dark side, I decided that we needed to replace the family CD player with an iHome-type of MP3 playing device.  So I went down to the local big box electronics store to pick one up.  After walking around looking for them, a helpful young sales dude pointed me to the correct aisle.  When he pointed, I realized that his hands looked like chicken feet!  Instead of a palm and normal fingers, he had two gigantic digits and a thumb on each hand, with what appeared to be tiny nubblets of deformed digits sticking out of his wrist, kinda like the snow claw on a dog.

The sales guy proceeded to point out all of the different features of the various models which ranged between 65 and 275 dollars.  When he would tap a button with one of his articulated lobster claws to let me listen to the sound quality, I would say out loud, “Oh, that’s pretty nice, it sounds alright, but what about that other one there?” while inside my head I was saying to myself “OMG, those hands are so bizarre; I hope he doesn’t see me staring; I bet he saves time on cutting his nails.”

Several of the units just wouldn’t play, so the sales guy used his lobster claws to yank out cables, toggle power switches, and jostle the merchandise, all the while recommending that I really should just get the BOSE sound system for 350 dollars.  I was feeling uncomfortable at this point only because I felt that it was wrong to be feeling uncomfortable around this nice guy with this odd deformity, and in a rush to be done with the whole experience, I went with a top name brand on the high end of selection.   I thanked him, bought the MP3 docking station and spent about 165 dollars.  And it sounds great.

I realized later that the store could have used this guy to do any job there, but they chose to put him on the sales floor because he really knew his stuff.  He’s a pro. And people like me tend to buy things from him when we wouldn’t spend as much with a different salesperson.