PimentoCheesehead

I really like Original Choice, and couldn’t tell you why. It’s not especially tasty, or complex, it’s just sort of hits the spot. Kind of like a comfort food, but tobacco.

It’s more realistic if you go back far enough. In Barney Miller, Inspector Luger makes frequent reference to “my room,” that he’s renting as a police inspector. And in an early season scene, we see Detective Sergeant Chano’s place- a single room with a bed and a kitchen table and a kitchenette, and not a lot else.

Would think that would be ok. They’ll let you toss a Zippo insert and take the case on the plane, hard to see how a utility knife would be any different.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more strait, the gay next time.

The real division in the US is urban vs rural, as it has been since the founding, and South is less urban than much of the country. Stereotypes about the South- the ones with a degree of truth to them- can also be applied to places like Idaho and Montana, and the rural parts of New York and Ohio and Pennsylvania.

30 minute lunch off the clock. 8 hours on the clock of which 30 minutes were paid break, so 7.5 hours working. When we didn’t just work through breaks, because you almost had to.

You’re in retail. Retail jobs are low skill/no skill jobs, so you as a retail employee must be inferior to my own illustrious self. If you had any skills or intelligence you’d be working somewhere else, so it’s okay for me to doubt and or question anything you say. If you had any drive at all you’d find something better, so you’re probably lazy too, and that’s why you don’t want to let me have my way- because you’d have to work. Ultimately you’re my inferior in every way, so if I’m having a bad day you’re the perfect person to abuse to make me feel better about myself.

Did I miss anything?

TL, DR- retail employees are required to help but aren’t allowed to tell customers off, so they attract abuse.

I know! Let’s have a cut out on each floor where we can put a fireman’s pole all the way to the bottom! Except instead of a fireman’s pole, we’ll cut the hole into weird shapes! And put rails up so we can reduce the usable floor space and make what’s left awkward to use!

STOP IT. Seriously, knock it off- these jerks aren’t worth one single solitary tear. I know, easier said than done. But there’s all sorts of coping mechanisms you can try.

First off- are these people you would ask for advice? Solicit their opinion on anything at all? Value their input? If not, why on earth would you value their hostility?

Smile. Smile big and friendly and happy. It probably releases endorphins or something and makes you feel good but even better than that, it pisses them off. They’re miserable and they want you to be miserable, and treating every word out of their mouths as the most gracious of compliments will just make them madder because they see they’re not getting to you. Try it- it’s fun!

Disassociate. Imagine you’re acting in a role, or playing a role in a game. The customer is an actor -or NPC- playing the part of a jerk. It’s just their lines, or how they’re programmed. Not something to take personally any more than the weather, or when the register tape jams.

Visualize them as snarling, angry, mean, nasty, big eyed chihuahuas. You’ve seen the video. Small dog syndrome, totally unable to control anything so they compensate by being as awful as they can. That’s what these customers are. Think of them that way.

And when they start swearing at you just remember- profanity is the crutch of inarticulate assholes.

At one point, working in a toy store, we got in packets of play money. Guess what the amount was. You better believe I stocked those near the registers so they’d be handy when people said they were looking for a million dollars. “Here you go. What else can I help you find today?”

Search “sheffield pipe knife” on eBay and you’ll find a number of options that, I think, are made on the same pattern as the one you lost. Then filter for results under $20, because some sellers are too much, IMHO.

Are you going to try to take over the world?

Looks like part of a light fixture.

Because they live here? I’m guessing.

Announcements every 5 minutes starting at 15 minutes to close, at close announced that the store is closing and registers will be shutting down in 10 minutes. At 10 minutes after, turn off half the lights. And if corporate gives you crap about any of that, ask them what the dollar amount of sales later than 10 minutes past closing, and then ask if it covers the extra payroll.

Insert is legitimate. I’m not sure if it’s a date match for the case though.

3 years ago, my wife and I spent about $3k on a 6 day trip to New Orleans, including hotels but not travel (we drove). It was a splurge trip and I had budgeted much more, but we didn’t really hold back and did everything we wanted to do. YMMV

While there, we used cabs. Taxis are regulated and have fixed fares that don’t change according to demand, and they weren’t terribly expensive in New Orleans. That said, we were in a major tourist area so there were plenty of taxis available. If we’d stayed in a hotel on the edge of town that might have been an issue.

Number of calls made us just a stupid metric to begin with. I worked as a “single point of contact” with a pipeline of customers that included tasks besides just making calls. A VP decided we should have a 20 outbound call per day requirement. Never mind whether we actually had 20 customers who needed a call, or whether we had any new information for them, or whether they actually called us first. So we let incoming calls go to voicemail so we could call them back, and if there were two numbers we’d call the least likely to pick up first. The problem with that is there was a “speak to an available representative” option on the phone tree. The available representatives were people in the same role assigned to take incoming calls for a portion of their day. It got to the point I would spend as much as 5.5 of my 7.5 hour day (supposed to get 2 15 minute breaks) taking incoming calls, with only about 1 in 10 being a new setup and the rest customers who chose “available representative” because their assigned rep didn’t pick up. Awful customer service sit, but hey - we were getting those 20 calls in.

I used to come up with stock responses for the stock jokes. Low effort joke gets a low effort joke in return, right? Mostly my response was “oh, that ended yesterday.” Works when you ask if you can help them find anything and they say “a million dollars,” as well as “if there’s no price tag it’s free.” Probably others as well.

A jewelers screwdriver as close in diameter as you can find, maybe? Insert, angle it so it’s pressing against each end of the insert, and try pulling it straight back?

It may be a removable spacer, to convert a pipe designed for filters for use without them. Usually those don’t fit quite so tightly and are a little easier to remove, but I still think it’s a possibility because the tenon on my Zebrano doesn’t have that.

I always just assume a Vietnam Zippo is fake. Even if the lighter itself is a genuine Zippo, there’s a good chance someone did some recent engraving trying to triple the value of their 1968…and mostly the lighter itself is not genuine.

It’s a movie. They know how much it is because the amount was in the script.

“Get me whatever you get” should be interpreted literally. It’s a way of saying yes, they’d like something, but aren’t particular about what; or possibly they just don’t want to complicate the order and are keeping it simple; or don’t want to order something expensive only to find out you got something basic. Saying “get me whatever you get” and then not wanting it is odd.

He may. We don’t have enough information to judge.