In 2017, after a long and fruitless stretch of job hunting, a friend told me she could get me in at her work.
“Don’t you work at an electronics store?” I said to her. “I don’t know anything about electronics.”
“Neither do I,” she shrugged. “But they’ll take you anyway.”
I took it as a casual retail gig to tide me over while I looked for another job that was more related to what I’d studied (I majored in Literature during my undergrad), but it quickly turned into a part-time job, and eventually, full-time job. A year and a half later, I’ve decided to quit, so I thought now would be a good time to look back on everything I learned during my time there - the good, the bad, and the downright annoying.
People Can Be Very Dumb
Some people find the idea of technology so overwhelming that they become absolute morons in the face of it. I had multiple customers come into the store just to ask me how to use a particular device they owned - a device that we didn’t even sell. I helped them, then they left without buying anything. I’ve also had more than one person complain a product didn’t work, only for me to point out that they hadn’t yet removed the plastic covering.
My personal favourite was a customer who called up to say that his battery-powered device had stopped working all of a sudden, after a couple of months. I asked him if he’d changed the batteries at all. There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“Oh…” he said, sounding confused. “No, I haven’t…. Do you reckon it might be faulty though?”
“I think it might just be the batteries,” I said, trying to remain polite.
“Oh, interesting… I’ll bring it back in just in case. Can you test it?”
I agreed to test it by putting in new batteries, which I did, and would you believe it? It worked. He was pleasantly surprised.
I Am Also Very Dumb
Speaking of dumb people, I am also very dumb.
I’d always fancied myself as relatively smart, at least when it came to book smarts. But in that environment, all the things I had long hung my hat on - being able to write a half-decent sentence, being well-read, being able to construct a fairly well-reasoned argument - were pretty much useless. Instead, the coveted staff members were the ones who could answer questions about Arduino, or the finer points of soldering, or could explain the difference between how to crimp two nearly identical BNC plugs. I worked alongside engineers who held more knowledge about electronics in their left toe than I did in my entire body. There’s something very humbling about that.
Some People Are Sexist, But Not Always How You Expect
Although I wasn’t an expert, people often expected me to know even less about electronics than I actually did. Occasionally, the sexism was blatant. A customer once asked my female friend who worked in the same store as me, “Can I speak to one of your male co-workers?” He was a jerk.
Usually, though, it was more subtle and well-intentioned. For example, customers would begin a conversation with, “Who should I ask about x?” as though I wasn’t standing there, being the exact person they should ask about x. Or the simplest display of competency would earn me an eyebrow raise and a, “Wow! Who taught you that?”
However, I don’t want to paint an unfair picture. Most people are actually pretty decent. In fact, the most sexist customer I ever encountered was an old woman who informed me, very sweetly, that no, I couldn’t help her, because she needed someone to open the battery compartment of her remote, and only a man would be able to work the screwdriver.
You should have seen her face when I unscrewed it myself. Could have knocked her over with a feather.
Men Aren’t Smarter Than Woman, But They Are More Willing To Give Things A Go
Since we’re on the topic of sexism, I have a sexist observation of my own. Granted, this is a huge generalisation, and of course there are exceptions to this rule, but I did notice it a lot.
There were plenty of men and women who came into the store and didn’t know a lot - or anything, really - about electronics. However, the difference in the attitudes of those men and woman were often stark. Men were usually in the mindset of, “Oh, I’ve never done that before, but give me a soldering iron and a YouTube tutorial and I’m sure I’ll figure it out.” Women, on the other hand, grew wide-eyed and pale, and waved their hands in fear. “Oh, no no no, I can’t do anything like that. I’m not good with electronics.”
I once had to patiently explain to a woman that she was fully capable of using a joiner to join together two telephone cables. “All you have to do is plug the cables into this little joiner here,” I said for what felt like the umpteenth time. “You don’t need to do any wiring.”
“Oh, it’s all too hard,” she exclaimed with a world-weary sigh. “I was never any good at Lego.”
Lego?! A human being said that to me!
Now, that’s an extreme example, but it applies in more subtle cases, too. I don’t think it’s an intrinsic male/female difference. I think that women are often told they won’t be good at STEM-related things, and they believe it, whereas men go through life confidently assuming there’s no mountain they can’t climb. Infuriatingly, the male attitude usually yields better results. Because, as much as this stuff can be incredibly complicated, other parts of it are quite simple. You don’t actually need to be a genius to know the basics - you just need someone to tell you what’s up. Women often aren’t told what’s up, so the cycle continues.
Plugs are Male and Sockets are Female, and Everyone is Surprisingly Matter-of-Fact about this
Speaking of males and female, plugs are called male and sockets are called female. This was one of the first things I learnt when I started working there, and I thought it was hilarious. To this day, I find the whole practice kind of tongue-in-cheek, but no one else ever seems to get the joke. I once said to a group of co-workers, “Don’t you think it’s funny that we name plugs and sockets after genitals?” and the most I got was a blank look and a, “Well, yeah. That’s what they look like.” And I mean, I know??? But that’s what makes it so funny???
The Negative End of the Battery Always Goes to the Spring
I actually learned this from a customer, very embarrassingly, when I was trying to look for the + and - marks on a product. He pointed out - a little irritated - that the negative always goes to the spring. Freaking Life Hack, that one was.
Watts is Volts times Amps
Speaking of life hacks, this is perhaps the most useful electronic formula I learned, and one everyone should probably know. Watts = Volts x Amps. So, if you have a 10 watt solar panel that outputs 12 volts, it can output a maximum of 0.833 amps. (For reference, phone chargers are between 1 and 3 amps.)
Similarly, if your appliance is drawing 5 amps at 240 volts, that’s a 1200 watt appliance. I didn’t understand this before I started working there, and judging by the conversations I had with customers on a daily basis, neither do a lot of other people.
Most Electronic Products Are Shitty
So many things were returned as faulty, I didn’t even blink an eyelid when someone complained. I’d just be like, “Oh, it worked for a month and then suddenly stopped? Cool, whatever, here’s another one.” Or, “Oh, the software that came with the device didn’t actually work at all? Of course it didn’t, here’s your money back.” You could argue that was laziness on my part, but in my defence, I bought a bunch of things from work during my time there, thanks to my 50% staff discount, and approximately half of these things ended up being faulty in some way. But hey, 50% off, right?!
Going from Analogue to Digital is a Pain in the Arse
If a customer came in wanting a cable with RCA on one end and HDMI on the other, I’d inwardly cringe, because I knew I’d have to explain to them that no such cable exists. You need a converter box, a HDMI cable, an RCA cable, and the box needs to be plugged into power.
“But that’s so expensive and annoying,” they’d exclaim, upon seeing the box and the price. “I just want a cable.”
“I know, but it doesn’t work that way,” I’d have to explain. “RCA is analogue and HDMI is digital.”
“But I saw a cable like that on Ebay for $10,” they would say.
“Then go buy it,” I’d want to tell them. “I’ll see you in a week when it doesn’t work.”
No, You Can’t Split An Ethernet Port without a Switch. Stop Asking.
Since we’re on the topic of common misconceptions that lead to annoying conversations, people always wanted a way to add just one more Ethernet port to their router or data socket in the wall. I’d show them our Ethernet switches - which come in 5 or 8 ports - and they’d shake their heads, as though I’d misunderstood.
“No, no, no,” they’d say. “I just want a cable with one Ethernet plug on one end and two sockets on the other. I don’t need a whole box.”
I’d try to explain that it doesn’t work that way; that if your TV and your computer, for example, are sharing the same Ethernet port, the data gets confused. The Google image photo you want to view on your laptop gets to the fork in the road - the split in this hypothetical cable - and has no idea what to do. Does it go left, to the laptop? Or right, to the TV, which will have no idea how to read it? That’s why you need a switch to direct traffic.
When I tried to explain this to people, they would stare back at me, dumbfounded.
“But… I saw one on Ebay,” they’d tell me.
Of course you did, annoying customer. Of course you did.