Maplin: world of lies

I don’t know where they buy the staff at places like Maplin and PC World. Seems they scour the zoos for potential employees, looking for the type of person who can connive cash from anyone, using well-placed fibs wrapped in technical jargon.

See, the other night I offered to help a local church hall make sense of their new sound system. My electrician friend installed it all and referred the church folk to me as the audio engineer.

So I turned up and began helping them through the joys of avoiding positive feedback, microphone placement, stand tips, trim, gain, and a host of other mixer-related topics. I had my work cut out for me given the combined ago of the five people there was over 300. But they got the concepts and I balanced it all for them so they had one knob to worry about in 90% of circumstances.

My job was made more difficult by the fact Maplin sold them a crappy stereo mic which was nowhere near sensitive enough for the application they required. But that wasn’t the worst part. The lady asked me if I’d mind showing them how to hook up the stereo so they could play music through the speakers.

“Sure,” I said. “Where’s the stereo? I’ll connect it up for you.”

“There,” she said, pointing past me into the cupboard.

I looked, couldn’t see anything. “Where, sorry?”

“There!” She pointed again.

“You mean this?” I said, pulling out the small, cassette-based dictaphone.

“Yes. The man at Maplins said it was what we needed.”

Silence. Then I spoke,

“The man at Maplins is off his rocker.”

(ahem, or words to that effect)

Where do these sales people get off, conning old people out of cash, selling unfit products just for the sake of a sale? A twenty quid CD player from Argos would be better than trying to coerce a dictaphone into playing something approaching the fidelity of music.

Although there are probably knowledgeable folk that do work at such places, it seems they’re eclipsed by the more prevalent genus: Dimmus Monkeyus. Just like at PC World who have never been the same in my eyes after my friend went in for a pair of 100Mb switches but there was only one on the shelf so he asked a sales assistant to see if he could find another out the back. The guy eventually came back and said,

“We haven’t got any more of those, but this’ll do the same job,” cheerily handing my friend an ADSL modem.

PC World? More like FAIL World.