Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.....

This is a quick post for those in the Bay Area. Next time you are in Fry's Electronics (the flagship south of Stanford), take a look around. You will notice a few things:

1) The employees read like a tree-ring history of Silicon Valley. The oldest are bearded white guys. Next you have a bunch of Indians. Youngest are East Asians all joined by a standard smattering of high school or early college-age guys who didn't quite make the cut for tech company internships. Don't take this as demeaning to anyone but the college kids. If I were to show up in another country speaking not a word of their language, I couldn't hope to do as well as many of these people (I have no skills).

2) These people are not attractive. Its not as though the raw stock isn't there (though for many there is no hope), its just that there's been no effort put into physical appearances. There are men with two day old stuble, women in bad shoes, and white shirts that are not tucked in (or sometimes can't be). Its like a store full of comic-book guy from the Simpsons. This should be considered demeaning.

3) The merchandise is often broken. I went back THREE times before I found a CD-RW drive that had all its parts (I should have checked in the parking lot) and that, once assembled, actually worked.


OK, that's enough rant for today.