Overheard

I thought I would share with you all a peak into what I hear, what people ask me and the thoughts that go through my mind - and yes I do realize I am going straight to hell for this...

Overheard in my office just now...

A lender from the Financial Institution that my company deals with just called our liason officer and this is what she said.. no exageration....

"Um, yeah, I tried to email you the information that you asked for, but the email was returned, and I'm not sure why...."
after a bit of investigation this is what we figured was the problem.... the lender wrote, as the email address... (I'll use my name here as an example.. ) "lspencer the at symbol fnf.ca"

no joke - this women actually wrote "the at symbol" instead of @ ... wow.....

Asked in a bookstore..

"Um, excuse me - do you have a litterary section?" My response - well, yes we do - it's the entire store, what might you be looking for?

This next one was asked to me one day - and the funny thing is, the two ladies were dead serious, and argued with me and my manager about it...

"Hi, we're looking for a book that our friend was telling us about - it's a BRAND NEW book by TOLSTOY.... called THE THREE MUSKATEERS..." At this request I turned to my manager, opened my eyes quite wide and tried to explain that
A) Leo Tolstoy died in 1912 and thus has not released any books in the last say, century... although I do recognize that it could be a re-release
and
B) Alexandre Dumas wrote the book The Three Muskateers around 1850, in France, not Russia.

They argued with us for about 10 minutes, and I even took them to each of the author's respective section... needless to say they didn't believe us and left in a bit of a huff....

And one more story for good measure...

While in the history section a lady looking quite barbie-ish comes up and asks me for a book... a historical memoir as she just finished on on Attila the Hun.....fine enough, we don't have a section for that but we started to look through the shelves for something that fit the bill... I found one about Mohammed and his descendants. I picked it up, showed it to her with a helpful "How about this one?"

She replied "Um, who is Mohamed?" - now fair enough, maybe she didn't know who he was so I tried to explain that he was the founder (for lack of a better term) of Islam...

She cocks her head to one side and says "I don't get it"... so I try to explain what Islam is - and added, "If you are Muslim, you follow the Islam faith..."

Still nothing - she was really, really not getting it, so I try with the geographical reference - Most Countries in the Middle East, and many countries in Asia are Muslim, plus a lot of people in Europe and N. America are Muslim too... basically it is a HUGE religion in the world....

At this point she was still in the dark and I couldn't deal with this anymore - has she not watched a news broadcast in the last 10 years? Is she not aware of 9-11?

I pushed the book into her hand, and said, maybe you should take this one then...

Wow, if this is what the world has come to... I am scared!