From: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Invisible
Date: 15 Dec 92 16:04:42 GMT
Reply-To: Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford)
Organization: Penicuik People's Revolutionary Sheepdog Liberation Front
Originator: awrc@hoy.dcs.ed.ac.uk

And lo, scooter@hirgon.hw.stratus.com (Scott Jeffrey) spake unto the masses
saying:
>
> Well, it happeneed to me yesterday; I became invisible.

I wish I had that problem. The only time I seem to become invisible is when
I'm standing at the bus stop on a dark night when it's pissing down and the
next bus isn't for an hour. That's a surefire guarantee I'll become
invisible just as the bus is passing. But I digress...

The recent problem has been *not* being invisible. In shops. Yep, it's the
pushy sales assistant peeve back again.

Now this should probably really have been one of Jenni's peeves about
visiting the UK, but since she's been back in the US for about three weeks
now and has yet to find the time to even read alt.peeves, let alone post, I
thought I'd borrow it since it seemed like a waste of a decent peeve.

The scenario - we've escaped from the laundrette and, apart from slight
signs of sideburns and a tendency to sing "Blue Suede Shoes" have recovered
from our brush with The Elvis Dimension. So we're now carrying a large bag
filled with not-completely-dry clothes. The apartment I'd rented for Jen's
visit *did* have an iron, but...well, let's say that when it was bought it
was the latest in technology. Iron the metal, that is, not iron the
household appliance. Considering much about the apartment, this didn't come
as a huge surprise but I'll leave the apartment peeves to Jenni. So we had
a choice...either use the provided iron and risk damaging a historical
artifact (the iron, not Jenni's clothes) or buy a new iron.

With the wedding not *too* far in the future and the realisation that we'd
need an iron then we took the plunge and bought Our First Household
Appliance. Handily we were passing a branch of Currys at the time (UK
electrical goods store for those of a USAn disposition) so we nipped in
there to buy something.

Now from careful reading of the likes of sci.military and similar, I'd been
under the impression that the maximum acceleration a human body can take is
somewhere around 15g if it's for a very short period, any more than that or
any longer than a split second or so and you end up looking like something
more suitable to alt.tasteless than alt.peeves. What's the relevance of
this to my current thread? Well, Given typical human reaction times, the
only way I can explain the fact that in the time it took Jenni and I to
find the irons and stop to look at them, the salesman managed to cross the
entire showroom and ask us if he could help us, would be if he had
accelerated from a standing start at approximately 200g. It shouldn't be
physically possible to cross that sort of distance in so short a time.

After politely telling the aforementioned high velocity sales drone that we
were just browsing we set about choosing an iron. Despite the drones
repeated queries, we eventually chose an iron. Not that it was an easy
choice - there was everything from Just An Iron type irons to irons that
looked as though, in addition to Dry Iron, Light Steam and Heavy Steam they
might have Afterburner or even Hyperdrive settings. Quite why anyone would
want an iron that looks as though it can do Mach 6 I don't know, but there
you have it.

What then ensued was that rarest of events, a true antipeeve. It might not
now in retrospect seem particularly antipeevish but at the time it gave us
a warm and happy glow inside.

As I've already stated, we were staying in an apartment I'd rented for
Jenni's visit. This, while possessing a reasonable degree of apartmentness
and being well located for touristy type stuff and roadworks, didn't have
all the amenities you'd associate with a normal home-type apartment. For
starters, it was a fair bet that nowhere in the apartment would we be able
to find a screwdriver. It may seem Very Strange to USAns (and probably to
almost everyone else who lives in a country technologically advanced enough
to have electricity) but most electrical appliances in the UK do *not* come
fitted with plugs. This presented us with an interesting quandary - we have
an iron but we have no way of plugging it in or even of fitting a plug.
Hence, rather than spend a non-trivial sum of money on what would amount to
an expensive paperweight, I innocently asked the sales drone if they fitted
plugs. "Oh, yes", he says with a slightly forced smile, "I'll fit a plug to
it for you, no problem."

Approximately fifteen minutes later, a salesdrone whose forced smile had
metamorphosed into something that more closely resembled spittle-flecked
bared teeth screwed the last screw back into place on the plug and with a
muffled cry of victory put the iron back into its box. Now I don't know
quite why this seemed like such an anti-peeve, since we actually had to pay
extra for the plug, but the gradual erosion of the sales drone's cocky "Can
I help you sir?" attitude into a state that was barely human, let alone
barely civilised over a period of just fifteen minutes and brought about by
a task as simple as fitting a plug was a joy to behold. The poor man was
burning effigies of us as we left the shop.

So there, if you want it, is a wonderful way to make your day more
enjoyable - torment pushy shop assistants. Whether it's asking an
incompetent in an electrical store to fit a plug, or the guy in Tandy for a
component you *know* doesn't exist, it's the ideal antidote to those shop
assistants who attempt to harass you into buying.

Of course, after having got him to fit the plug, the first thing we did
when we got back to the apartment was get Jenni's pocket knife (which not
only included two types of screwdriver but also seemed to have a corkscrew,
a couple of knife blades, a small nuclear accelerator, a mass spectrometer,
a time machine and a thing for getting stones out of horse's hooves) and
take the plug apart again so Jenni could get to grips with the wiring of a
UK plug.

-- 
		Not Al Crawford - Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk
      "Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist sheepdog thang"
Xref: sparky alt.peeves:18420 alt.angst:4869