So, a couple of days ago I determined that my Airport wireless base station is well and truly dead, so I dropped it off at a local Apple-authorized repair place on my way into work. (I am - so far - impressed with this place. Often when dealing with computer service people, I have to go through endless rounds of, "Yeah, yeah. I tried that. I went through all the troubleshooting steps in the manual. It's broken. Really." I took my base station in, and said, "This is broken. The lights do not light." The technician took it from me, plugged it in, said, "Yup. No lights. It's broken," and had me fill out a little form, and sent me on my way. Yay, efficiency. It bodes well for the quality of the repair work, I think.)

This place happened to be across the street from a Fry's. Since Fry's is to a geek what a candy store is to a six year-old with a sweet tooth, I had to stop in and have a quick browse.

So, I'm browsing, minding my own business, when this guy comes up to me and demands rather brusquely, "Where are the USB keychain drives?" I manage a befoozled blink. "You know, Zip drives? Memory cards?"

My speech centers suffer a catastrophic processing overload and lock up as I try to simultaneously express the concepts, "I'm sorry, I don't work here," and, "Sir, if I am not mistaken, you have just named three completely different devices." I settle for pointing and saying, "I think I saw some back there." I quietly return to my browsing.

I kind of feel like a jerk for not telling him that I wasn't am employee. He's exactly the sort of guy who would go and complain about having gotten rude service.

But really. I had a piece of merchandise in my hand. I was, I think, fairly obviously browsing the shelf before me rather than engaging in employee-type activities. As far as I can tell, the only reason he had for assuming that I was an employee was that I was wearing a white buttoned-down shirt and khaki pants. (Fry's employees wear white buttoned-down shirts and black pants. No points for observation there.)

I get mistaken for an employee at the local Borders all the time, too. That doesn't even bother me anymore. I usually tell people that I don't work there, but I can probably find their book for them anyway. Most people don't take me up on it.

Anyway, I made it to work without further events of note. Have been squashing bugs in one of my online Help projects.

I also went to a project meeting for the product whose manual I sent to the printer last week. I finished up my brief status report on the manual by saying, "I want to thank X, Y, and Z for helping me pull together some last minute information close to the deadline." Then the other tech writer gave a little thank you to his subject matter experts, and then the project leader made a little speech about documentation being really important, thanking us for working so hard on the manuals. And then one of the engineers wrapped up his status report with, "And now that we have this new custom of thanking people, I want to thank A."

I really have to be careful, or I'll end up turning a project status meeting into the Oscars ceremony. Whoops.