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www.twitter.com/TiemenZwaan: 'My co-workers made a red cover window. The quotes are the kind of questions we get now and then.'
www.twitter.com/TiemenZwaan: 'My co-workers made a red cover window. The quotes are the kind of questions we get now and then.'
[First visit:]
"Do you have stamps with Santa on them?"
"I'm sorry, the stamps with Santa on them were seasonal and we won't have more until next Christmas season. We have stamps with kittens on them, would you like one?"
"Hm, I had been fixated on Santa."
"I'm sorry." [pulls out plastic-sheeted binder with several hundred varieties of available stamps.] "It's Spring now, how about a stamp with flowers on it?"
"[sigh] No, I really wanted a Santa. Thank you, though."
[Second visit:]
[thinks: "The last time I tried to buy a stamp at the Post Office, they didn't have any."]
"Do you sell stamps here?"
And the few who do recognize themselves will be bemused by the reminder of that one time they totally had a brainfart.
"This is my own mental model of how human nature works in this situation, honed by many years of observation, theorizing, and being generally very impressed with itself. Its approximation to objective reality is uncorrelated as of yet and will exhibit variance proximal to those of other mental models of human nature, some of which are probably much more accurate for this specific situation."
Those without the requisite awareness would view this display like someone on the ground watching a passenger jumbojet flying overhead at 35,000 feet.
I suppose most people making these requests do so in isolation, without thinking about other people who will have asked the same or similar questions. Whereas the poor booksellers have heard these woolly enquiries hundreds of times.
I had friends who worked in record shops, and they experienced exactly the same kind of thing.