Ignorance is bliss ... but whose bliss is it?

On a hot, summer, southern California day, I stopped at a convenience store to get some ice. I'd never been to this particular place before and didn't know where the ice was. The place wasn't that big, and I could have looked around until I found it, but I am far too lazy to do that when there is a clerk standing right there eagerly awaiting the opportunity to help me out.

"Hi. Where's the ice?" I asked.

He just pointed towards the far corner at the back of the store. Apparently, he wasn't as eager to serve as I might have hoped. I looked in the direction he indicated, but from where I was standing, I could see no sign of ice. Well, laziness is a funny thing, because it permeates every aspect of your life. I wasn't interested in walking all the way back there until I knew there was some ice in that corner, and I hadn't ruled out the possibility that he was, in fact, pointing to a cooler outside. So, before taking another step, I asked my eager-to-please, service-oriented font of grocery knowledge, "Is it inside or outside?"

That's when any pretense of customer service disappeared. The clerk crossed his arms, looked at me and said, "How am I going to send you outside for ice?"

Every once in a while someone says something to you that is so unexpected, your brain struggles to process it. Had the clerk said to me, "It's raining pink elephants outside, and I don't have a thing to wear", it would have been one of those things. "How am I going to send you outside for ice?" was another. I stood there blinking at him for a couple of seconds like an orangutan with a lobotomy before I finally managed to say, "Are you serious?"

Apparently he was, because his answer was, "How am I going to send you outside for ice?"

There's not a lot of good that can come from a discussion with a guy like this, so it's best to just walk away. Unfortunately, that's really hard to do sometimes. Instead, I explained, "A lot of places sell their ice from a big white cooler that they keep outside."

"Those are the supermarkets."

What?? At this point, it was clear that the guy didn't know what he was talking about and would never admit it. I don't have a problem with ignorance; we're all ignorant about something. But ignorance with attitude is really annoying. I saw myself getting sucked in, and I didn't like it, but I just couldn't let the guy off with that.

"Well, I used to work in a convenience store that had one of those coolers outside, so it's not just the supermarkets."

Einstein-the-clerk shrugged. I headed to the far corner of the store where, sure enough, the ice was stacked in the bottom of the beer cooler.

I paid for my ice without another word, and while I'm sure the whole thing was forgotten, from his standpoint, by the time I left the store, I marveled all the way home at what this fellow had said to me, and more importantly, how he had said it.

If you ask me, I was the victim all the way. Not only did I get publicly ridiculed by a mental midget, but the guy got under my skin enough that I was still thinking about the episode long after it had stopped ratting around in the prodigious empty space between his ears. And to top it all off, I have to deal with the guilt of knowing that I could have avoided the entire thing if I had just been willing to find the ice on my own.