The Condescension of Young Chinese Men

Went to Fry's Electronics this evening. It's is an experience you put off until it's absolutely unavoidable. And, long story short, it was unavoidable. Now Fry's... Fry's stores are these vast yet cluttered places, not undecorated so much as underdecorated. Warehouse Gothic married to a patchily applied, kitchsy Wild West theme. Tiffany-ish, fake gas-lamps and Buffalo Bill motifs tossed here and there amidst raw aluminum shelving units. Your basic, deconstructed, warehouse/storage/industrial attitude can be knowing, muscular and full of promise. But this is decorated just enough to make you depressed -- and no more.

And oh, the people. The humanity! The milling, teeming multitudes with home electronics predicaments, children in tow, elderly grandparents being wheeled along on gurneys, women with baskets on top of their heads, chickens under their arms. All with whatever few posessions they could gather together before joining the tide of displaced peoples heading to Fry's. Brown people, Jews in yarmulkes, Russian babushkas, whole Sudanese villages. Water buffaloes with rings in their noses. The wretched of the earth.

But I'm straying from the point here. My issue this evening is that I got talked into getting the faster, $179 Hitachi 60GB internal drive as well as the $35 three-year Fry's warranty. Which I am now quite sure I shouldn't have gotten. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. The cell phone with the camera in it: classic example. A daily reminder of my craven timidity, of how easily I can be sold something beyond my needs and over my budget.

Now, I'm fairly hardened against your basic white sales guy. The hype, the mousse, the wide football stance. The relentless pressure to get the Caprice with the undercoating. "What's it gonna take to get you into this car today?"

Pfft. Doesn't even register.

No, here's the one you really gotta look out for: the young, Chinese geek.

Fidgety, post-adolescent, looking at the floor and flicking black hair out of his glasses, it's not like he's trying to sell you anything; he's not interested in being there. He's not interested in customers -- or people, for that matter. He doesn't even particularly care about making money. All he wants is to be at home playing Halo.

And if you knew anything about anything -- which clearly you do not -- he wouldn't have to waste his time explaining to you that 60 GB represents the minimum level of technology you have to have to exist in the world. He's like, Duh!

For your part, well, you want to have the esoteric understanding brought by this visitor from the future. You want the secret of fire. So you buy the damn thing. And the warranty.

He's too young to have pity for you, and in a few years he's going to be extremely busy running his own company. So in all probability he's never going to have the opportunity to develop the emotion at all. But if he felt anything towards you it would be pity. Because my friend, you are the wretched of the earth.