Ooh, I just remembered a spectacular example of customer stupidity, of the 'employees are psychic variety.
I worked for a while in an airport branch of a large UK coffee shop chain. I once had a guy come in and ask for ‘My usual’. Having never seen the guy before, I asked him what exactly that was.
He didn’t know.
He did, however, insist that I should know, because he bought it from [chain] all the time, and that was how he always ordered.
From a branch 30 miles away.
I was the customer.
This was back in the '60s, and it was the first time I’d ever smoked pot. I went to McDonald’s and order a “ham jelly.” The guy said, “Excuse me?” and I repeated that I wanted a ham jelly. He said they don’t have anything called that, and I insisted that they do, in fact they’re in the business of selling ham jellies. So he figured out that I wanted a hamburger, and sold me one.
So I sat there eating my delicious ham jelly, thinking that I must be imaging I’m wearing clothes, but really am naked.
Ham jelly! That’s great…
And much less confrontational than my stoner friend who held up the drive through asking why the hell can’t I get four Big Macs is it because I’m white I mean I want four Big Macs is that so bad, it’s because I’m overweight right and I suppose you want me to order your frickin salad instead?
No, sir, it’s because you’re at Burger Chef.
This wasn’t exactly my customer, but someone once called my office number, and insisted that I was her doctor.
“BigRetailCo, BlahBlah department, this is MightyMouse, how can I help you?”
“Hello, is this Dr. Soandso?”
“No Ma’am, this is MightyMouse in the BlahBlah department of BigRetailCo”
“Well, are you a doctor?”
“To my mother’s eternal regret, Ma’am, I am not”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“I was indeed but I see now that it was inappropriate, you are trying to reach a doctor, seem to have misdialed or by some other accident been connected to me instead. I do apologize for my levity. I hope you are able to connect with your physician and he is able to provide you the help you need”
“Not at all, you are such a polite young man and your accent is just lovely”
“As is yours madam, good bye”
I was writing a piece of software that would display the scanned cover of a book inside a square panel in the program window. Books are all different shapes - some are square, others wider than they are tall; others taller than they are wide. The software fit the image into the box - so wide books had letterbox bars at the top and bottom; tall books had blank columns at the sides (square books fit perfectly); the conversation with the customer went something like this:
Customer: Can’t you make that fit better in the box?
Me: Books are all different shapes, and the program has to show them in that box. We could crop the images so they occupy the whole box, but then you will lose parts of the image
Cust: No, I don’t want that. Make them fit.
Me: You mean stretch or squash them so they are square, and will fit? I don’t think that will look good.
Cust: No, just make them fit in the box.
Me: Make a rectangle fit in a square, without cropping, stretching, or adding bars?
Cust: Yes, that’s it. Make them fit in the whole box, but without any of that stuff.
Me: Um…
There’s a possibly-apocryphal story of a Union officer in Virginia during the Civil War, who was rarely seen without a novel in his hand. He was making polite conversation with a Virginia woman, and asked her if she’d seen “Lees Miserables”.
“Well, they’re better than Grant’s Miserables!”, she snapped back.
I had this same conversation when I was selling some of my photography online. The woman liked one of my photos, but she wanted it in portrait mode, rather than landscape (or vice-versa). Without distorting it or cropping it or adding blank areas. I COULD NOT get her to understand why this wasn’t possible.
Well, if we’re going THERE, I got a lot of stories.
My mother told me a nice story the other day with her late best friend Ulla in the role of the customer. For the none-soccer fans: BVB Borussia Dortmund is one of the most popular and successful German soccer clubs:
One off Ulla’s grandsons wanted to have a Borussia Dortmund fan scarf for his birthday. So Ulla went to the sports shop “I’m looking for a Borussia Dortmund scarf.” When the salesperson returned with the scarf, she cried “Oh no, yellow and black, that’s not nice! Don’t you have it in different colors?”
I’ve seen Chicago Cubs caps in colors other than the proper blue. I recall pink and green, and some googling finds red, white, and black as well, including black with the C logo also in black. 
Wouldn’t happen with Bundesliga fan gear, with one possible exception that every club has an official alternative team gear in different colors, for cases in which they play a team with too similar colors. It might be that some fan articles are sold in that alternative colors (I think mostly the shirts themselves), but hardly fan scarves, which always come in the traditional, official team colors.
U.S. teams typically have home and away uniforms, so you’ll usually find fan apparel in both schemes. It’s become increasingly common for U.S. teams, especially NFL teams (American football) to have various “throwback” and other variants - pretty much in order to justify different versions of fan gear. Pink fan gear for breast cancer awareness is also pretty much universal at this point, I think.
Add to that fan made variants, which might only exist as digital images, and you can probably find just about any color scheme for any U.S. sports team, if you look hard enough.
I showed the 7 Red Lines skit to my management colleagues after I handed in my notice in my last IT job, and told them this is what it’s been like to work on a project with them.
But did they get the point?
Or did they need a marker, in a different color, in order to have the point explained?
(Full disclosure: I could only get about 2/3 of the way through before flipping out & closing the screen. Too “on point” for me.)
I get that. “This should be easy stuff a lot” New SQL server, web server and application server later, well, I’m still working on it.
True but if a kid asked you for a Cubs hat, would you get them anything other than a traditional blue one?
That video literally made so uncomfortable that I had to pause it several times.