Usually where you were born/grew up. We have a database that verifies social security numbers to names/addresses that also gives state of issue.
The first three numbers indicates which state issued the ssn. Each state is assigned a prefix block. I have the list at work.
Fun with fraud, I have it every day.
Okay, so I used to work at one of those big-ass chain bookstores - I’m sure everyone’s seen the basic layout: reqisters and queue line near the exit (generally with a big sing indicating that the registers are there) , plus a big desk in the middle of the sales floor with a sign that says “INFORMATION”.
That desk is there to give people information.
Regardless of this fact, any time the checkout line got more than three people long, someone would inevitably sidle up to the INFORMATION desk, and ask (if we were lucky they would ask rather than simply demand), “Can you ring this up for me?”
“No, sir, this desk is only for customer information.”
“But I just need you to ring up one thing for me.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no register here. All our registers are over there.”
“You should have a register over here.”
Arrrrrgh!
The retail store I work in sells its own brand of soda and does not stock any two litre bottles of Coke, Pepsi, etc. We do carry the 12 can packs of them, however.
One day a customer walks through my line and asks where our two litres of Coke are. I politely inform him that we do not carry Coke, but we do carry the store brand. He says he wants Coke, so I tell him we do stock the 12 packs. He doesn’t want a 12 pack and demands to know where the two litres are. I patiemtly tell him that we don’t have any. He starts yelling and making a huge scene saying that we are a store so we have to carry Coke. I mean, yes we are a store, no we are not required to carry Coke, so don’t whine to me about it.
===============
My all time favorite -
Customer - Do you print checks here?
me - Yes, would you like that printed for the exact amount?
Customer - Yes. (hands me the check)
Me - Uh, excuse me, but you have to sign the check.
Customer - What, you mean it doesn’t print the signature for you?
Oh. my. god. What is the world coming to?
Hmmm. Silly customer enquiries. Always more fun (IMO) when injected with humour while the customer is there.
Working in record shops offers many classic moments.
(Some of these may disclose my age btw 
)
Customer "Do you have maltloafs “Bat Out Of Hell?”
[When Herb Alperts “Rise” was released as a single, very popular as a 12" single]
14 Y.O. schoolgirl “Do you have a 12” rise?"
Me [blushing and shuffling slightly] “Well, um, no… but I can manage a 7”?
Customer “Do you have the Sex Pistols Bollocks?”
As a former office supply store worker, I have plenty of stories to share. What follows is just a small sampling from my archive of stupidity experienced in retail. Some I skipped because they are too long or were recurring problems that I dealt with.
A lady needed a backup tape, so I showed her the ones we had. She said it was described as 3.5" and holding 1.44 megabytes. I then asked her if she meant that she needed floppy disks. She said this wasn’t what she was after. I showed her the disks and pointed out that they were 3.5 inch disks that hold 1.44 megabytes each. I had her look at the disks and I explained to her that floppy disks are the only type of storage medium I know of with these specifications. She insisted that this wasn’t what she was needing, so I just gave up and thought, “whatever.” :rolleyes:
A guy asked me if he’d lose all his computer information if he unplugged his system. I told him he’d lose anything that wasn’t saved, but everything on the hard drive will still be there. I was so tempted to tell him that he’d have to reinstall everything since the data would leak out of the electrical cords when they are unplugged. He probably would have believed me, too.
I had a moron customer who didn’t understand how connecting to the Internet worked and how he was to retrieve email. I told him that the computer had to be connected to a phone line via a modem (unless he was using DSL or cable, which I highly doubted as this guy was too stupid for me to have bothered explaining this) I quoted him that day as saying “I thought email came through the computer, not the phone.” Okay, whatever you say, sir.
We had clearance bins out on the floor one day. They were very clearly marked. One was for items under $3.00, one was for items that were $3.00 to $5.00 and one for items that were over $5.00, pretty simple for those of us who paid attention in kindergarten, but it seemed that some people were absent the day they covered counting numbers. I had two people on the same day who must have been confused by the complicated verbiage on the sign that read “over $5.00” and were asking me what it meant. Stunned by their utter stupidity, I was at a loss for words in trying to break it down into even simpler terms that maybe their puny brains might actually understand.
A guy ordered a couple lap desks, which are those boards with a pillow underneath them so that a person can lay it on his/her lap and have a flat surface to work on. The packaging showed someone using a laptop computer on the desk. When he came in to pick them up he thought that the computer came with the desk! They were $14.99 apiece and he thought that they came with a computer?! If that were the case my car would have been about $75 and my house could have been paid off within a couple of paychecks. Can people’s IQ’s really go this low?!
Well, that’s only a couple months worth of highlights and this post is already getting pretty long, so I will just leave at this for now.
“Does this camera take pictures?”
After a fairly confusing conversation, I figured out she was asing if it was a digital camera, or film-based.
One time, this clearly drunken shopper waved a cheap (US$8.96) universal remote about three inches from my face and demanded to know why it was so expensive. Knowing they were gonna be kicked out of the store anyways, I let them know the true reason: “Just to piss you off-- we heard you were going to stop by, and thank you!”
Then there was this shopper who asked me if it wouldn’t be much cheaper just to buy the monitor and keyboard, and connect them directly to each other. “I don’t need the modem, I just want to read email.”
Also-- After installing Mandrake 8.1 last year, I found that I do in fact have the ability to delete “The Internet”… I did so, just because, but it seems not to have worked. Silly me, mistaking a shortcut to my KPPP dialer for the power to RULE THE WORLD!
I was just reminded of another brilliant customer. I too worked at a big chain bookstore with prominantly marked registers near the exit and information desks on both floors. The upstairs information desk, which faced the top of the stairs, had a large sign which stated in capital letters, “ALL REGISTERS ARE LOCATED DOWNSTAIRS.”
So I’m standing at the info desk and a high-school aged girl comes up to me and hands me a couple of CDs. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t ring these up here, you’ll have to go downstairs.”
“But the sign says that all your registers --”
“Are located downstairs. That’s right.”
There was a moment of silence as she glared at the sign, then she stomped off downstairs. I have yet to figure out exactly what she thought the sign meant.
Oooh, I get this one all the time. If I know the person and have some time to beat around the bush, this is my response:
Me: “You sure you’re department budgeted for this?”
Him: “Uh, yeah, I think so…”
Me: “Okay, we’ll just have to slap several hundred terabytes of hard drive space in there, install some OC48 lines, maybe a thousand or so processors, and 256 GB of memory. We’ll need to look at battery backup solutions as well. Can’t have the Internet going down because of a stupid power outage.”
Him: “Really? All that?”
Me: “Yup. Where’s your computer?”
Him: “Under my desk.”
Me: “It’s gonna have to move…”
Other smartassed responses:
Them: “My computers frozen!”
Me: “Don’t touch it! I’ll bring over a heat lamp now so we can thaw it out. Hopefully it’s salvageable.”
Them: “I lost my password!”
Me: “Have you checked behind your computer? Sometimes they fall out the back.”
alternately:
Me: “Look in your purse or in the back seat of your car. They’re always in the place you least expect them.”
Them: “The Internet is down!”
Me: “Hmmm, lemme check.” Hold phone up to keyboard and tap random keys “Hit Refresh Page now. How’s that?”
Them: “Great! You got it going!”
Them: “The Internet is slow!”
Me: “Oh wait, the Internet Knob was set to Slow. Let me turn it up.” pause “How’s that?”
Them: “No, it’s still slow.”
Me: “Well, give it some time. It needs to warm up.”
(I actually installed a knob from a junked microwave on our wall and labeled it Internet: Do Not Touch! with Off thru Fast hash marks so our visitors believed we had this wondrous thing.)
My favorite comment so far is from a user who knew a little about computers. Not stupid, just phrased poorly: “My mouse balls are dirty.”
Dear dear. If ever I feel like I am a bit of a dim bulb, this thread will remind me that I am not the worst out there! 
When I worked retail I had some dumb questions, but I won’t cite them here. I just had a few lapses in my otherwise polite and chirpy retail persona, where the real smartass came out. Fortunately, I didn’t get fired. (Not that I was ever that bad…)
I worked at a fabric store. We had special measuring tables in the middle of the store, where people could bring up fabrics, laces and trims to get them measured and cut by an employee, who would write down the yardage amount and price of the fabric on a special slip of paper. The customer would then bring up the cut yardage (or cut lace, whatever) to the register and have it rung up.
When I worked at the register, customers were forever coming up to the cash register (which clearly did not have enough table space to measure and cut fabric) and want something measured and cut, and I’d have to send them to the cutting table. It was pretty irritating sometimes—we even put signs up saying that the register was not a cutting table, but people kept on coming up wanting us to cut their yardage. (Even huge-ass bolts of fabric—how did they see us making the space to measure it on that little register area?)
One day, a lady comes up to the register with a spool of lace and asks, “How many yards are on this spool?” There was NO room at the register area to measure anything (full of merchandise and clutter) so I couldn’t imagine how she thought I’d be measuring it for her there. Something came over me, and I took the spool of lace, put it to my forehead (a la Karmac) and said, “It feels like ten yards.” The woman blinked and said, “No, I wanted you to measure it.” I then directed her to the cutting table.
Another time, the register cash drawer was open for a longer than usual time (I was counting something up, or looking for something in it). The annoying tone the register gives off when the drawer is open was going on and on, as the drawer stayed open. A woman waiting at the register says, “What is that sound?” I say (without thinking), “It’s coming from inside your head!” I immediately apologized, amazed and appalled that those words came out of my mouth. But the woman said it was OK, and kept on laughing and tittering. As she walked out of the store, I could still heard her laughing.
I just posted this in the customers suck thread but I hrlped run a used video game business that my boss ran out of her home and a swap meet/flea market
First thng wed be asked is "do they work "
Other times wed get people who bnought broken or non working things from other places and swear they bought them from us
Or like the lady that bought a atari game and tried to put it in her sega genesis …
When the cd doms and consoles came out it became a hassle … Lots of people thought you could put sega cd 3d0 ps1 ect in a pc and vice-versa
customer comes up to the stand holding the playstation she just bought
This dosent work she says…
Yes it does I say since It was mine until last week …
Well I tried tp play this <insert pc game here > in it and it didnt work
When she showed me the game I said thats not made for a ps1 its for a computer
Well the lady at wal-mart told me i could play cds in it…
I patiently explained yes you can play music cds and and cds specfically made for the machiene
I guess she wasnt happy becuase she thought she could play computer games on it
She ended up selling it back to us at a loss …
Yeah…but not in 1997. Seriously, I racked my brain for anything else she could possibly have sold me nine pieces of, without using scissors. Turns out she was just a blazing idiot. Who’d a’ thot it?
</hijack>
This information is also available at the Social Security website
I once got into a long argument with someone calling the Social Security information number over why I couldn’t just assign her two-month-old daughter a Social Security number over the phone. She needed a number right now because her parents wanted to set up some sort of trust fund for the daughter and the application which had been filed at the hospital hadn’t been processed yet (since these applications go through the state records offices first, the processing time could be up to three months). My attempts to explain that the system didn’t work that way, that numbers had to be assigned by our central office computer which I could not access, and that if she would go to her local office with proper identification (which she obviously couldn’t show me over the phone) they had access to get a number assigned within a week were greeted with my favorite phrase:
“I pay your salary, you have to help me.” :rolleyes:
When I worked as a caseworker at a shelter for homeless women with children in NYC and wasn’t doing what a client wanted, I got the classic “My welfare check pays your salary.” Huh?!
Also, “What’s the address to 250 Broadway?” “The phone is busy, what do I do now?” “I tried this other phone number; it has the same first three digits so it’s probably the same office, right?”
But the classic stupid question came from me, in a clearly marked kosher deli in the Bronx: “Can I get a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich?” :o :smack:
Oh, I forgot about the two seperate slackjaws who came in looking for WHITE toner for their colour copiers. They let these people drive motor vehicles. The first moron got a dumbfounded “We only stock cyan, magenta, yellow and black toner, sir.” The second moron got a can of Coffee Mate[sup]tm[/sup], a fit of giggles, and then a suggestion to try loading the machine with white paper. I only held that purloined can in reserve for two years before I had the opportunity to use it. Good for a laugh, but somehow profoundly discouraging, too.
[sup]If I didn’t want to stay employed, I’d have loved to had said “Oh… Zero sent you, eh? The “white” is just in, fresh off a container from China. Quality merchandise. Bring your truck around back, and no funny stuff, or somebody’ll get hurt.”[/sup]
My first job was working in a bagel store. I worked there almost 3 years. My best story comes from my last week there:
Me (observing a woman intently studying the menu): Hi, welcome to [name of store here]. How can I help you?
Her: Your chicken spaetzle soup, is that vegetarian?
Me (with a straight face, though I have no idea how I did it): No, it has chicken in it.
I’ll admit that she seemed appropriately ashamed when she realized what she asked. She probably was more focused on the word “spaetzle” and what that entailed, and forgot about the whole “chicken” aspect of the soup.
My favorite “dumb customer” web site. is www.actsofgord.com . It’s run by Gord, who owns a used video game/rental store in Canada. You don’t need to play video games to get some laughs out of it, but it might help.
Oh, I forgot about the two seperate slackjaws who came in looking for WHITE toner for their colour copiers. They let these people drive motor vehicles. The first moron got a dumbfounded “We only stock cyan, magenta, yellow and black toner, sir.” The second moron got a can of Coffee Mate[sup]tm[/sup], a fit of giggles, and then a suggestion to try loading the machine with white paper. I only held that purloined can in reserve for two years before I had the opportunity to use it. Good for a laugh, but somehow profoundly discouraging, too.
[sup]If I didn’t want to stay employed, I’d have loved to had said “Oh… Zero sent you, eh? The “white” is just in, fresh off a container from China. Quality merchandise. Bring your truck around back, and no funny stuff, or somebody’ll get hurt.”[/sup]
Not a customer, exactly, but similar:
I do public relations and marketing for the facilities department of a very large corporation. One of the initiatives we’re working on currently is an intranet-based work order system, whereby users nationwide can place their facilities work orders, track the progress, run reports, &c. The company is very strict about bandwidth usage on its site: no page’s content can exceed 11K, and there is no streaming content. This is important.
So, I’m at one of our major facilities in North Carolina, doing my marketing thing, giving out tchotchkies, telling people not only about the service itself, but also about what the facilities department does. Some guy comes up to me and makes this totally clueless suggestion: “I think you need to attach webcams to the engineers’ heads so that we can get on the site and watch what they’re doing and make sure they’re doing their jobs. Wouldn’t that be a great idea?”
“Sir, it is our job to ensure that our engineers do their jobs. Not yours.”
“Yeah, but we have to make sure!”
“Have you had problems?”
“No…”
(trying a different tack) “I’m sorry, sir - the technologies department won’t let us have more than 11K per page.”
“I’ll bet if you talked to them they could figure out a way.”
“They are very strict about it. Besides, do you really have so much free time you can keep track of the engineers?”
Webcams on the engineers’ heads. THAT would have gone over real well. Especially when the engineers had to use the Little Engineers’ Room. :rolleyes: And we’re not even talking about the CORD issue.
Whats bigger, a whole or a half?
white or wheat what?
do you have plain white milk? (me blank stare)
plain white milk? (more blank stare)
2%? (aw yeah we got 2%) Note this fantastic question hit me on a day that I hadn’t slept at all the night before.
At the cash register of the self pump gas station I worked at for a while last summer, from a customer who had paid with a credit card at the self-service pump, “I didn’t want premium gas”.