By: staniel [2001-08-03]

My Motley Crew

being a cast of characters for any future Radio Shack lore

there are some people mentioned below, about whom I may have something incriminating to say. their names will be censored, Victorian style.

Rich may be known to thingsihate readers; I can't remember. he is a fortysomething former engineer who allowed his skills to become outdated, landing him in the Shack. RS management boasts that their employees can show a customer how anything in the store works. as anyone who's ever visited one of their stores knows, this is a filthy lie. a few people know most of the stock, like myself and roomie Sean, but Rich was the only one to have all-encompassing knowledge, and he actually knows WHY they work, as well. this can be troublesome if another electronics aficionado wanders in, as they will discuss ham radio for approximately four hours. more, if the customer has ever been in the Army or Air Force. Rich has fallen off radar towers, been jilted in love, had his teeth messed with by those fabulous Army dentists, and is in general a man of the world with many stories. he runs on coffee and Marlboro 100's, eats at least 3 Goya jalapeno peppers per day, and some days, nothing else. TJ (see below) has put forth the theory that Rich's chest cavity is literally a cavity, devoid of organs and inhabited only by pepper juice, coffee oil, and tar.

TJ is a smart fellow. he was my boss when I first started, and he quit having put in less time en total than I did. smart fellow indeed. he now plays a lot of Pokemon and studies astrophysics. he succeeded where Dino failed, having actually set me on fire with a thrown match. the best way to do this is to throw it in the same motion you make to strike it - it should be fluid and graceful - and, as it exits your hand, yell "HODUKEN!" I believe, at the time this occurred, we were supposed to be counting inventory.

D---- was the most incompetent human being I have ever worked with, and I've worked with a few. he even lacked the capacity to walk without bumping into large, immobile objects, and basically managed to wound himself by way of clumsiness so frequently that Sean and I made a game of counting the number of times he did so each day. he violated the Code that we salesserfs followed, namely, he took returns without stalling, lying, and becoming belligerent (not necessarily in that order - it's an art form, be creative!) and, despite the fact that he never sold anything, stole customers from people. his urge to do this was so great that when we were all sitting in the back room smoking, he would crouch by the stockroom door, with his head handily lined up with the doorknob. when a customer entered (or exited - he didn't always look, and would just take his cue from the hideously screeching doorbell) he would spring into action, and subsequently crumple to the floor with a new crater in his skull.

Lisas 1, 2, and 3 were all wonderful women who shared the same name, and were lesbians. none of them were particularly damaged or damaging, though, so their amusement value to readers is probably not so great. the coincidence was remarkable at the time, I assure you.

E---n... oh, Lord. she was a nice enough person, but the stream of frightening people who constituted her group of friends and regular customer base gave me the willies, from her best friend (who was a little slow and developed a crush on almost any male she was acquainted with for more than ten minutes) to her former employer (she used to drive limos, according to her, and be a prostitute, according to popular rumor), a large ogre. I swear to God, this man was some sort of hairy fantasy humanoid. he had the magical ability to become enraged if a small part was out of stock, and we had to block the door open for an hour after he left to let the odor waft away.

then there's E---e, the source of the rumor about E---n. picture him, if you will, as a typical South Philly Italian dude, except the typical regional accent is filtered through Alf's voice. it was weird. he was always in trouble, for offenses ranging from not working to sexual harassment. the story behind this is that some little kid stuck her tongue out at him, so he responded in kind. who knows. I hope he didn't do anything untoward, though. his dad had three rusted-beyond-restorability '39 Pontiacs on their lawn, which is wicked cool.

J--- was my boss for a brief period of time, a coked up former paratrooper with whom I used to go drinking. E---e was constantly pissing him off, and one night, J--- had to be restrained from going to his house, pounding on his door, and presumably, pounding on him. he would bring along a cronie of his who was a poor choice for a drinking buddy, as alcohol made him suicidal. I think now that hanging out with these two was the most depressing two months of my life. we all went to a strip bar one night, which was possibly the least erotic place I've ever been, and I still can't hear The Vengabus without having painful flashbacks.

finally, we come to S-----, who preceded TJ. I only met her a few times, since she had been managing a Philly store for a year before I started, but she did come in a few times. I will let circumstances speak for her, rather than my own experiences: for months (and this is after she'd been gone a year), people would poke their heads in the door and ask me, "is THAT WOMAN here?" there are many less-amusing things known that proved her foulness, but let it be said that
she became involved in fisticuffs with customers on more than one occasion.
new action-adventure series ... [2001-08-03 05:03:53] Lou Duchez
... The RS-Team!

I imagine putting all these people into a crack commando team that drives around in a van and helps people. Kind of like the A-Team but without the talent.

I've learned my lesson, though: stay away from anyone whose name basically consists of hyphens.
hyphens [2001-08-03 06:03:59] staniel
you can't be too careful. this is why I haven't posted my old DM's url to Portal of Evil yet. perhaps anonymously, since I doubt he reads this site (then again, bad luck with former DM's has been had under that assumption).
people, I shall tell you this: I was hanging out at the Silk City Lounge tonight, and it takes the company of a mighty good friend to make a $5 Manhattan worthwhile. ah, good times.
Goya Jalpeños [2001-08-03 08:14:25] König Prüß, GfbAEV
I can envisage this RS in a Jersey Mall with a book store and food shops and record stores and chicks with Big Hair and guys with mullets. I used to eat some kind of canned jalapeños that had pickled carrots, but I've since become a fan of the Goya peppers, which I figure is because of the tumeric. I researched tumeric a bit, and besides being tastey, tumeric capsules are often prescribed; medicine has not found a substitute. I got circuit boards, chips, and telephones all over the damned place now, so I feel like I'm living in a radio shack.
Radio Shack pros and cons [2001-08-03 13:55:42] Lou Duchez
The biggest con is, you have to give your damn address just to buy a nine-volt battery. I'm sure the RS employees hate this as much as customers do.

But I will be forever grateful to Radio Shack for selling 5000 mcd red LEDs. With the proper resistors and a battery, they make for a swank flashlight. I used to work in a dental office, and I built such a light for the darkroom. Of course, I built the light into a plastic miner's-style forehead lamp, just so I could walk around the office with the thing on. I also built a similar gizmo for someone working in the county's photo lab, and I'm told it was a lifesaver.

But yes, oddly enough, those LEDs seem to be safe for black-and-white film.
names [2001-08-03 14:44:58] noisia
all the victorian stuff i've read when they hide a name it's Mr. M_____ or Ms. Q_____
Ms [2001-08-03 14:53:05] Sean
I don't believe the title "Ms." was around long before Ms. the magazine, which popularized the term.

That's the story my news writing instructor gave me, anyway.
Mizz [2001-08-03 15:00:34] Riff
Isn't it short for 'mistress', anyway? The connotations on that aren't so nice anymore.

You know what's strange? Well, yes, I'm sure you do, but what I'm thinking of is this: when you're riding the bus, and you're thinking random thoughts, and you fall asleep - but you do it so gradually you don't notice. And instead of dreaming per se, you're now thinking really strange random thoughts, but they don't strike you as strange because you're dreaming. And then the bus hits a bump and you wake up and instantly forget every detail of what you were thinking about, except that it was really bizarre. That happens to me all the time. I wish Radio Shack sold some kind of brain-recording device so I could record it and play it back and see just what was so weird. (See, I mentioned Radio Shack. I'm on-topic.)
Ms [2001-08-03 17:00:45] König Prüß, GfbAEV
Indeed, Poe wrote a piece entitled, "Ms Found in a Bottle." The story is listed as an arabesque, I suppose as opposed to a pirouette, a plié, or an entrechat. Finding an Ms. in a bottle does seem like an arabesque kind of tale, suggesting wishes p'raps. But Poe's story is of becoming entangled in the rigging of the mysterious Black Ship. The story ends with a Maelstrom imminent, foreshadowing "The Descent into the Maelstrom," a lesson on survival in turbulent times.
Ms. Radio Shack [2001-08-03 17:50:02] Pop
Um, Poe's Ms. stood for "manuscript."

My only Radio Shack story took place on January 2, 2000, when I traveled to the local RS to try to buy a jetpack. Damn it, I was promised a jetpack in the year 2000, and I'm sick of waiting. They just stared at me as if they didn't know what the heck I was talking about, which is usually the case at Radio Shack. Come to think of it, that's usually the case with the other places I go too.
Edmund's Optical [2001-08-03 19:04:26] König Prüß, GfbAEV
I think that it was either Radio Shack or Edmund's Optical from which I got a Van der Graaf Particle Accelerator. It sounds very Hi-Tech, but it's a static collector based on a rubber band belt drive. It's basically a box, a tube, and a spun-aluminum ball; you've seen one, I'm sure: they make your hair stand up, and send crackling blue bolts off. But I'd thought to get two of them, separate the particles somewhat and funnel that through the second accelerator to see if there was a measurable static repulsion effect. If so, rocket packs might be just around the corner. And even more in the TEV range. I'm a big fan of Tesla.
The Radio Shack Game [2001-08-03 21:02:24] Catherine
As bored teenagers often do, I once invented a game that a couple of friends (former friends, as it happens; they later turned out to be bigoted redneck assholes, but that's another story) and I played to amuse ourselves a few years ago while trying to grow up in the suburbs.

We'd go into one of the local Radio Shacks and ask for some obscure item, either invented on the spot, or lifted directly from movies or television: "quantum resonator coils", "triaxalating phase inducers", and the one that started it all, the flux capacitor, as seen in Back to the Future.

The goal of the game was this: to attempt to get a Radio Shack employee to admit that they had no idea what the hell we were talking about. So far as I know, all Radio Shack employees in Southwestern Ontario are trained to give only three responses to any request for help finding an unusual item. They are as follows:

1. "We're out of stock."
2. "We don't carry those anymore."
3. "Let me get the manager."

In the event that a subordinate selects Response 3, the Radio Shack manager in turn must choose from either Response 1 or Response 2. Under NO circumstances whatsoever is the manager or any of the sales-droids allowed to admit their ignorance. Presumably, if these guidelines, nay, RULES were not followed to the letter, all of reality would collapse in on itself. It's just one of those design flaws in the fabric of the universe, I guess.

Eventually, we got tired of the game and stopped harassing the poor people, many of whom, I like to remind myself, have undoubtedly gone on to design bridges and work as air traffic controllers. I take comfort in that.

Coincidentally, I was very pleased to discover today that while my new personal favourite electronics parts and surplus store here in Toronto, Active Surplus, did NOT have the obscure monitor connector I was seeking, they DO have a large bucket of wires and other miscellaneous crap labeled "flux capacitors". That more than made up for any connector-related disappointment I would otherwise have experienced.
that worm has turned... [2001-08-03 21:26:22] staniel
a couple of sleazy managers I didn't mention were fond of telling old ladies that the symptoms they described pointed to a faulty flux capacitor and that they should buy this shiny new replacement, this one here, the most expensive one we have...
I called other stores a few times asking to do a stock transfer. for a moss-covered, three-handled Gredunza. we had one guy looking for it.
Kid from Toronto [2001-08-03 22:18:32] König Prüß, GfbAEV
So, I'm riding my bike back down the Washington&Old Dominion Train Trail from Reston, Virginia, and when I get to the Vienna City Limits I take a break on the bench to huff a couple of Camels and a kid from Toronto stops and starts talking to me about the Vienna Caboose Town Mural Project. I'd seen it underway a couple of times passing by, but the kid fom Toronto says he's out drumming up donations from the local merchants to finance paint and refreshments for the Art Crew, so I give him a buck. Also, I tell him about the Wild Indians around MacGregor Bay, Ontario who will wrap you up in a green Elk skin and leave your sorry ass out in the Sun to die slowly by being crushed to death by the shrinking Elk hide. The "Toronto Kid" is down by the Caboose talking to the Art Crew by the time that I pedal up, and I look in the Caboose and all the toy trains are still there and the entire side of a block-long building is roughed out with a bigger than life sized graphic representation of a locomotive pulling the Past into the Future like a blue baby with a set of stainless steel forceps by a none too gentle ob/gyn chicken plucker. I get back to the 'hood and stop by the gas station to gas-up my tyres and I guess that I over did it a bit because by the time that I got to the Chinese Restaurant there was a treemendous BANG! and about a dozen Chinese looked like they didn't know whether to shit or go blind, but it was just my back tyre protesting 75lbs. psi air pressure, but I got extra wheels, tubes, tyres, graphite mandibles and so on.
I love active surplus [2001-08-03 22:45:56] peet
If I lived in toronto I'd be there every day. 8 bucks for a black keyboard with a "sega" logo on it. Did sega really make pc keyboards? so many boxes of cdrom lasers. It's like every 'extra' piece that came from every home-repair job landed in this store. There's always someone trying to communicate to one of the employees "I'm looking for a sprocket thing for my computer, you know? It's a compaq."

I work in a somewhat crappy computer retail store right next to the Radio Shack. Every couple of days they come by and ask for a favour (usually to shrink wrap something, and I loooove shrinkwrapping) but will still charge me full price (50 bucks cdn) on a 4-way rca a/v switch. A growing store rivalry is developing. Perhaps, in a few weeks, I'll have a new story about the time I leaned a garbage can of water against their shipping doors. Rivalries are fun.
rivalries [2001-08-03 23:32:55] noisia
hopefully this should help you in your rivalry. although it refers to video stores i'm sure the basic tentets should remain the same.
hmm [2001-08-04 00:52:58] staniel
you could advise all your elderly customers not to buy extended service options, and while you're at it tell them that a 3 year contract for MSN dialup is a bad idea since cable will be cheaper than the $20/mo dial service (which you'll still be obligated to buy) by then...
I thought they were called Inter-Tan in Canada?
hey König... [2001-08-04 18:37:35] staniel
so, you like-a the Camels? I got sick of the sweetness after a while, but that Turkish tobacco ain't bad at all. I may have to grab a pack of Turkish Specials next time I'm in Philly, as long as they're not a Nat Sherman product. all Nat Sherman cigarettes (Fantasia, Turkish Ovals, Phantoms, Queens, &c) taste like cheap cigars.
test [2001-08-04 18:49:13] Riff
ignore this, just checking to see if links work here
Flux Capacitor [2001-08-04 19:08:15] Riff
Back when I used to work in troubleshooting for Bell South's internet service, every couple of days I'd get a call that required the user to reinstall Windows. They'd usually ask why, of course. I'm a Mac user, and don't really know the secret innards of Windows (nor do I want to), so the real answer was "because we've tried everything else and I'll be damned if I know what's wrong", but of course you can't say that. So I'd tell them that their thurman.dll file was corrupted and you have to get a fresh install to fix it.

A high-school friend and I used to play a conversational game like that:
"You see, the problem is they've got the wrong sort of interlock brace valve. They ship them with the wrong gear-stepping mechanisms."
"That's right, they come with the five-thread ratchet arms, and you really need six for that kind of workload, otherwise your pivot heads don't get the right kind of pressure on the torque unloaders."
"I find that you can make up for it with a reframbulated annulite baseplate - that way you can access the 20-lift over the refresh cams - but they're hard to find these days."
"Yeah, I had to swap my last reverse-oscillating thrash reverberator for one when my wobble cams went out last fall."
"Wow, that's steep, I wouldn't usually give more than a forwards-oscillator, or maybe a couple twist-gear pivot rinds. But I guess when you need one, you really need one. Who'd you trade with?"
"The Baron, that chiselling bastard. He'd swap his own mother for a box of cloverleaf sprawl flange-head assemblies."

And so forth. Hey, we had to keep ourselves amused somehow.
[2001-08-04 19:22:44] Jonas
How much longer until no one can be sure that everyone else even knows what they're talking about??
Hmm [2001-08-04 20:26:13] Riff
What time is it?
I'd say, oh, about three years ago.
jargon [2001-08-04 20:50:27] staniel
so many people in IT use terms they've heard enough to know what context they work in, but that are not actually understood by them, that I think I may have to start doing this.
the closest I've come to the ratchet Baron thing is when quoting a Lenore comic to a friend outside of work while all the day shift people were leaving, and having one walk by just as I said (in the closest voice to a cute little girl I could approximate) "I've been embalmed!"
Navy Cut [2001-08-04 21:02:09] König Prüß, GfbAEV
I get some Navy cut tobacco at the local pipe shop that is a high per centage of Turk. The Navy cut originated, I understand, from sailors smuggling tobacco back to England in their neck scarves. They'd roll 3 or 5 leaves up, then they'd slice off enough for a pipe, kind of was shredded like cigarette tobacco. So, this Turk pipe tobacco is a bunch of leaves pressed and then cut into slices. It's pretty damp, and requires some manicuring and fluffing out before loading a pipe, but one pipe is about all that I can smoke in a day, it's that strong. It's a light smoke, but it kicks my butt! It needs to be tamped a bit before it starts smoking cool and sweet. My favorite pipe is a section
of cherry branch with a long, narrow bowl and a thin curved stem. I smoke those Turkish Specials, too. "Turkish State Tobacco Monopoly"
"Less than 1% nicotine" Ha! Yenidje tobacco.
nicotainia [2001-08-05 01:53:28] staniel
I think the only tobacco that produces more than 1% nicotine is the stuff that used to be used as arrow poison in the pre-colonial Americas.
Sniff [2001-08-05 16:23:03] Pop
I miss Petey.
Petey [2001-08-05 17:41:37] Annna
If Thingsihate North had a scanner and/or could connect at better than 19.2 kbps, there would be more Petey.
What!?!? [2001-08-05 20:56:10] König Prüß, GfbAEV
There's yet more Petey? Someone should get Ben a Petey T-shirt to tide him over.
broken [2001-08-06 00:55:49] staniel
my muffler is falling off.
the worm, you know the one, is turning.
I have had not enough sleep.
I am full of grease.
all in all, a good day. I think I may start eating exclusively at restaurants that have crazy crap on the walls. there is a place in NY Chinatown called the East Boat Lobster Restaurant that always decorates for the wrong holiday and does unexpected things with lobster. think American cheese, but don't think it for too long.
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