Sadly, so it is with today's world. Gone are the days when you could speak to staff in a retail store confident that they had good product knowledge. We have become a throwaway society. If it doesn't work, throw it away, buy a new one, hence the person in the store doesn't need to know much beyond getting you to buy a product and selling it to you. Sure, it keeps people in jobs in the manufacturing arena but the tradeoff is the mountain of junk that no one wants anymore. Try buying a part for something. The price of the part is out of proportion to the cost of the product in the first place.
When I only had the Acorn - before the RISC OS - I found it really necessary to have a reasonable knowledge of my computer and what I needed. My Acorn only had 4 megs of RAM and I wanted a laser printer. This meant that I needed a printer that had it's own memory. After doing the research online I decided upon an Oki. I went to the local store and the fun began. I ordered an Oki laser printer. The bloke behind the counter dug a hole for himself asking "What sort of PC do you have?" Suppressing a laugh and thinking oOo.. Here we go again ...oOO I said, "Actually, it is an Acorn A4000." He responded with "What's that?" I responded with "It's a computer from the Acorn range." I then went on to explain why I needed such a printer, though for the life of me, I don't know where his brain was, here was I trying to buy a rather expensive printer and he wanted to argue about the operating system. Finally he placed the order. When it arrived he phoned and I asked if I could pop down with the Acorn and download the Printer Definition Files via the PC they have online for customer use. Puzzled, he agreed. The Acorn is small, you can tuck it under your arm, so I toddled down and connected the Acorn to their monitor and used my own keyboard and mouse. I told him that what I would like to do was download the file onto a floppy disk and transfer to the Acorn. He spluttered "But that will never work, it is a different operating system." I told him it most definitely would and downloaded the file to the floppy. Put it into the acorn changed the file type to something Acorn could read, installed and much to his amazement all was well. I asked him to give me a wee demo on how the printer worked from his perspective. He did so, and I was able to print with the Acorn on both paper and card, which is what I wanted in the first place. After that we got along just fine but it was hard work to that point. Thankfully he was there a along time and I sent other Acorn users along to the store.
At the end of the day, when you use a non standard operating system you don't expect the store staff to be all knowledgeable but a good understanding of the products they sell goes a long way.
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