I might have already written about this story here, but a little over a decade ago I saw a dude refuse to leave a customer service line at Walmart the day after Christmas until they agreed to refund him for a dozen or so bottles of perfume that were NOT purchased at Walmart. It was just his refusal to cooperate, listen to reason or back down in any way that eventually broke them. He went through two or three cashiers, a manager and eventually the store manager. The store manager asked him what the perfume was worth, typed a special code into the register that denoted “giving some fucking asshole $100 so he will go away” to the higher ups and was able to satisfy the “customer.”

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I learned a few important lessons that day. The first was that Walmart does have the power to return ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING. It was shortly after this that they instituted the “show us your driver’s license if you don’t have a receipt” policy, but that just means that you can only pull shenanigans a few times a year before they get suspicious. I also learned the power of stubbornness. I didn’t think it was a virtue, but it was definitely power. I mean, the guy was clearly a lying fuckhole trying to defraud the store. That much was abundantly clear. He knew what he was doing, THEY knew what he was doing and he KNEW that they knew what he was doing. Still, he stood there INSISTING that the world conform to his will. He demanded that reality reshape itself to match his desire just by standing there and repeating the same lie over and over and over. Again, I did not think this was a good thing to do, and I did not plan to incorporate this tactic into my own dealings in the future, but it was certainly educational to see how it played out and to extrapolate how this might and DOES play out all over the world every single day.

The other thing I learned is that I probably shouldn’t be too nervous about trying to return the Playstation that I ruined while attempting to solder on a mod-chip that would let me play burned games. Compared to the other guy, I might as well have been there to deliver back rubs and blowjobs for all the employees. Subsequently, I did NOT try to modify the brand new Playstation that they gave me. I learned my lesson.