Not So Famous…

Last night we went to Best Buy to look for some gifts for my sister’s birthday. Yesterday, I also bought an mp3 player on Amazon.com around mid-morning.  I figured while I was at Best Buy, I might as well swing by and see if they had my device on display so I could at least see it.  lol. This is not where my geekiness becomes a problem, but for what it’s worth, I LOVE my mp3 player.  ;)

Where it gets out of control is where I get to the counter, and the dude behind the counter is trying to sell a REALLY nice mp3 player to a REALLY not technologically-inclined woman.  She seemed really nice, and she was quite good looking, which means the geek behind the counter was trying to throw out all these technical terms, and wasn’t making a lot of sense.  He was also confusing his customer rather than impressing her with his bevvy of technological terms. At one point, this woman asked how she got the mp3’s to play on the mp3 player.  He said, “legal, or illegal?”  (GREAT thing to tell your customers by the way…dork.) They talked about a service called Rhapsody, which he was trying to sell to her, and a male friend of this woman asked the dude behind the counter what quality the Rhapsody songs were.  He said, “I assume they’re at 192Kbps.”  (A reasonable assumption, actually.)  However, his problem was saying, “I assume…”  She said, “You assume that?”  He stammered and stuttered a little while, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to answer her question very well, so I jumped in.

“192Kbps is quite common in the world of mp3 as an acceptable bitrate for encoding these music files, so it’s reasonable to assume that Rhapsody offers that as a standard encoding.” The woman wanted to know what CD Quality audio was for comparison…she asked the dude behind the counter.  He said…

“Oh, well, uh…much…uh….higher than 192…it’s…uh…bigger….more, uh….” I got annoyed again.

“Anywhere between 256Kbps and 324Kbps is true CD-quality, but most people, myself included, aren’t really going to notice the difference without VERY high quality speakers or VERY expensive noise-cancelling headphones.  The human ear can only hear a certain range of frequencies, and much higher than 192Kbps really captures a great deal of data that very few people can actually hear, so the quality decrease for 192Kbps is really quite negligible.” At this point, apparently, I have angered the Geek-in-training behind the counter.  I obviously know much more than he does, and I’m obviously far more articulate than he is.  And I’ve made him look like a moron in front of a beautiful woman.  (Who is there with a male friend, little geek wannabe!!  Woman + Man = Wannabe geek has no chance!!!)

So he begins explaining how the difference is definitely noticeable between 192Kbps and 256Kbps. (Now, he’s apparently completely abandoned the idea of selling her the Rhapsody service because he’s now arguing that she’ll not be satisfied with 192Kbps.)  He starts telling her how she can pay $15/month for the Rhapsody service to download as many songs as she wants, but if she leaves the service, she’ll lose everything she’s downloaded.  He starts talking up his illegal Russian mp3 site.  So I started explaining to her that technically, that’s illegal.

“That site he’s talking about is illegal.  You had indicated that you wanted to be legal, and if you still feel that way, I suggest you don’t listen to him so much.”  This was apparently the wrong thing to say to the poor geek-in-training.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure you download illegal mp3’s too, pal.”

“Not that it matters, but we’re not talking about me.  We’re trying to find this woman an mp3 service so she can use this over-priced device you’re selling her.”  I was getting bored though, because he was increasingly more interested in attacking my choice of mp3 player than helping the woman in front of him.

“You know, I want to say we don’t even have any of those devices, so, uh, yeah…”

I smiled at the woman and her friend and left to find out how my family was faring in the digital camera department.  It turns out that the woman helping them was very nice, and liked to smile.  Infinitely more pleasant than the butt-hurt wannabe geek I was walking away from.

So I’m not entirely sure what made me even speak when I was at the mp3 player counter.  I used to be a quiet dude in stores.  My thing was to get in, and get out as quickly as possible.  It could be that I knew we’d be stuck at Best Buy for some time yet, and I had nothing better to do than to prove to some woman that the guy desperately trying to impress her with his lack of knowledge was rather an idiot.  It’s possible that once I had thrown the gauntlet of “You Really Know Nothing” I had to stay until he had completely made a fool of himself.  Or it’s possible that I was just “in a mood”.  Whatever it was, I think I need to ungeek for awhile or something.

I must say, it WAS fun.  And my grandmother, who knows nothing of electronic devices, bitrates, and mp3 services, said afterwards, “He didn’t know much of what he was talking about, did he?” Now THAT is sad.

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