sub-woofer-schmoofer

I fell victim to the spirit of yelling again today. I couldn't help it.

On Sunday, I stopped in a little electronics shop to see if they had speakers for my computer that were electric instead of battery powered. They did. The guy was all proud of the fact that these had a sub-woofer. (woofer-schmoofer; I'm just tired of buying batteries every time I turn around!). Anyway, I asked him about the sound quality and he assured me that it was great. I asked him specifically if I didn't like the sound quality, could I bring it back. Yeah, yeah, sure. No problem.

So I got my little speakers home and plugged them in. And when I turned the power on, I thought a small plane was landing on my desk! I couldn't even hear the music over the drone of the sub-woofer. Sigh. I boxed them back up and merrily took them back to the shop today. He meticulously took them out of the box, plugged them into an outlet, turned the power on and the engine started droning. There was a lot of noise in the shop so it didn't sound as bad as in my home, but it was still droning. He plugged it into a nice stereo and said, see, there's nothing wrong with this—refusing to admit that there was an issue.

I reminded him that he told me I could bring them back if I didn't like the sound. No, what he meant was I could bring them back if they were not working, and these were working just fine. Evidently in his world, music sounds better with a super loud, sub-woofing hum to go along with it. He would not give me my money back. I yelled. It didn't work. He insisted that there was nothing wrong with them. I ended up leaving the store in a huff telling the customers in there not to buy anything from this man. (I could tell they couldn't understand me, so maybe it really doesn't count as bad against me?)

I will do my best to never complain about Wal-mart again. I once returned a sewing machine there after two months, WITHOUT a receipt. Now that's customer service. It seems that the locals here know nothing about even being friendly to patrons.

I should have given up after the electronics store, but dummy me had to go looking for a lamp. There's a lighting store near Sandra's and I decided to check it out. It had a couple of lamps that I was actually seriously considering buying. After about 10 minutes of waiting for the sales guy to stop yelling into his cell phone and help me with my purchase, I saw another lamp I wanted to check out a bit closer. I bent over some boxes and stuff heaped up in the floor to look at it, and evidently when I did, my empty backpack touched a floor lamp, cause the guy who had previously been ignoring me started yelling and pointing at me. Okay, okay! I moved about a half a foot away from the floor lamp, but was still interested in the other one, so I leaned over again. This time he started yelling, "Your bag, your bag..." and then a long stream of Hebrew I didn't understand. I yelled back that my bag was nowhere near the lamp and turned around and walked out the door as he continued to yell at me.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't care how much I want something—if the salesperson is rude, I won't buy it. I guess I'm just funny that way. I would think that common sense would say that being nice might drum up a little more business. But I guess not in Jerusalem. I have a small plane engine disguised as a sub-woofer to prove it.

Oh well, let's look at the bright side: I've now found a use for a couple of Hebrew phrases that I've learned lately:
Ha matose tas
and
al ha shulchan
Which, when you put them together, is probably a horrible English spelling of "The plane is landing on the table." Or something like that.