are you being served?

Riddle me this, friends...

Is there ever a situation where you can imagine approaching a clerk, asking for a service, and receiving the reply:

"Those staff members won't be here until 11 o'clock. Please have three-quarters-of-an-hour of patience."

Have you EVER been asked to have 3/4 of an hour of patience? When you want to buy something? Can one just summon that sort of patience on command? In talking this over with Franke last night, I realized that this is probably going to be my shining example of how Germany just doesn't get customer service. This is something almost everyone warned me about -- it made it into the book of suggestions from last year's group of fellows, for instance -- but I've just sort of shrugged it off.

At the time, however, I think I literally just looked at the man, closed my mouth, turned around, and left. Then I went to that particular media superstore's competitor (take that, eh!), found that their internet salesmen were also not in until 11 am, and went to the big, nice department store to at least be productive with my 45 minutes of patience. The results of that exercise were as follows:

- even during the spring sales, shoes are still really expensive here. I miss the Macy's crazy-shoe-rack.
- there is no pasta on sale in the food division of the nice department store. But there is lots and lots of soup mix.
- I want the new Radiohead CD.

In other news, I got a surprise text message from my new internet provider*, telling me that my new information was on its way. We are not friends, internet provider. Not until you give me the internet.

*the provider is called Alice, and it's mascot is a hot young girl in a black cocktail dress who sort of dances around their ads (speed & beauty? use the internet to meet similarly hot girls? don't know what they're going for, really). Somehow this premise of personality makes the premise of being in touch first by text message all the more funny.