Audience of One

As seen on TV

When I arrived at the camera shop, the assistant manager was away on holiday, having just recently been promoted. The manager was a nice guy called Chris (short for Christopher) and knew everything about photography. Any question a customer had that I didn’t know the answer to, he did (and he answered all my questions too).

Shortly afterwards, he had an affair with one of his employees, who promptly left the shop. A week later, Chris left the company without serving his notice, and the employee returned. This was just as the assistant manager returned from holiday. Having just been promoted to assistant manager, he was forced to become the manager for two months before we found a new manager.

The new manager arrived, fresh from a non-photographic part of the retail industry.

Manager: (looking up at digital cameras) Who’d pay more than two hundred pounds for a camera?

Me: (taking him round the corner to our digital SLRs) Oh, lots of people…

Manager: You have got to be kidding me.

Our new manager is also called Chris, short for Cristobal. This has led to amusing conversations with customers.

Customer: Hi, is Chris about?

Me: Do you mean Old Chris or New Chris?

Customer: Well, he was quite young, but I wouldn’t call him new exactly…

New Chris has been a good manager, but it’s lucky that the assistant manager is also a photographic genius or I’d be up a gum tree half the time. The only problem is, with days off currently arranged as they are, there could well be occasions when I, of four months proper photographic experience, am the resident expert.

Recently, a colleague at the second camera shop in the city was sacked for, as far as I could tell, no apparent reason. (He had always been the most helpful member of staff whenever I’d gone in there, and was sacked due to “looking after his staff more than his customers”. He was the assistant manager, making that his job.) One of my colleagues at my store resigned in protest. Two days later she realised she needed the money and didn’t have another job. She asked to withdraw her resignation, and was refused as it emerged that she’d been abusing her position as a keyholder and had let civilians into the office (where there are many cameras, none of them CCTV) after hours. As a two-thousand pound camera has recently been stolen (but then found again in an extremely unlikely place), the security tapes were checked, and she was seen entering the store with friends at eight in the evening. When asked about it, she lied.

In a couple of weeks time, a security guy is coming from head office to investigate the theft. Until then, we have to search each others bags every evening. As I recently discovered another work perk (that of staff loans of stock), a search of my bag recently uncovered a five hundred pound lens by a colleague who didn’t know about this system.

Colleague: Hey, Chris, Matthew’s trying to steal a lens!

Chris: No, that’s okay, I’m letting him bor—

Colleague: You’re letting him steal a lens?! <pause> Can I have one?

And just to round off, a conversation with a customer:

Me: What type of computer do you have?

Customer: A Mac.

Me: Do you have OS X?

Customer: Excuse me? (Sniggers are heard from my colleagues.)

Me: Do you have OS X?

Customer: Oh… yes, I do.

Later on, I discovered that everyone listening to that conversation, including the customer, was sure that I had asked him “Do you have, er, sex?” There is a technical writer inside Apple’s headquarters guffawing away right now at the adoption of roman numerals for Apple’s latest operating system series….

Matthew @ 12:22, January 5, 2006 to Diary | Comments (6)