Buying a camera from PC World is like making love to a hideously ugly woman – really awful right up until your lack of respect for them convinces you to jizz in their eye.

You know, I hate PC World. I hate going, and just generally being inside it’s hollow, metallic walls. Giving that company money feels wrong and disgusting. But I love buying things from there because every attempt I make is cluttered with so much real-world fail it’s like watching a lorry full of Z-List celebrities and bouncy-balls jack-knife and spill it’s load out on to the motorway in a bloody, pulpy, bouncy mess. It’s horrific fun, and though I couldn’t experience it every day without going mental, it’s good to have once in a while. I’m conflicted, like a sex addict who can only find ugly hookers. I’d abandon the place altogether if it’s useless, unknowledgable staff didn’t make the whole process just so darn entertaining.

Last time I set foot in there, I was trying to get my clammy mitts on a new PC. I encountered incredibly bad ‘managers’, store assistants who ran away and a general unwillingness to allow me to buy what I wanted to buy. Couple all of that with a level of incompetence to rival the Scottish Football Team, and you have a customer experience that critics are calling ‘pretty gay’.

Now, a camera is a much smaller purchase than a full PC – only £80 in the end, compared to £800 or whatever – so you’d think it’d be easier to walk in, get it, and walk out again relatively unscathed. But then, it isn’t called Camera World, is it? It’s PC World. Where, presumably, their speciality is selling Personal Computers to people who want them. So, if buying a PC was a fairly major ordeal, buying anything else was only going to turn into a huge clusterfuckery of ‘The Staff Vs My Willingness To Take Their Shit’. The precedent had been set, yet I still didn’t really expect it to be as complicated and time-consuming as it was.

My first mistake, I’ll admit, was a rookie one. I drove there wearing a big black cowboy hat and shiny sunglasses (proof slightly below), but then I took those off before entering the store.

I can’t quite remember why I was wearing those; I was a little hungover, very tired, and things were just happening so quickly. But the point is I removed them before attempting the purchase. This meant I walked in looking reasonably normal, forgettable, and non-crazy. This was a problem because it seems the staff are more than willing to forget a customer and leg it away – even more so when that customer is friendly and personable. If I’d strolled in, rocking a huge cowboy hat and swinging my gigantic balls from side to side like Danny Dyer at a Bollock Swinging Competition, I’m sure I’d have been in, serviced and out quicker than I could say ‘Fackin Ell’ in my best Mockney accent. But no, I was my usual lovely self (shut up) minus the mild delirium I was beginning to experience from being over-tired and a solid mile away from the nearest energy drink.

But anyway – to begin the process I had to enter, walk up to the camera section, pick out one I’d like to view and grab the nearest staff member until they let me have a play with it. In theory.

(Spoiler: I didn’t actually buy the first camera I asked to view…so this might turn into a long read…)

The parts of that plan I could accomplish myself were done with the sort of speed and efficiency that would have pleased a Nazi commander – I was clear and concise in my invasion of the Camera Section, and I knew exactly what I wanted from my occupation of the Rhineland trip to the store. I picked one out – the cheapest – and hailed the nearest person. At the time of my interruption, she was trying to look mildly interested in a rack of printer ink, hiding from any real customer who might wish to bother her. I snuck up on her and quiet, nicely, asked if she could help me out with buying a camera.

Except she was useless to me – the ‘HP’ badge she discreetly wore meant she couldn’t help me with my purchase unless it was a HP product (I thought we, as a culture, were past this sort of needless segregation), but would endeavour to find a member of staff who could. If by ‘endeavour’, I mean ‘run away a bit and eventually send a useless fat man to my aid’, then the previous statement is completely accurate. Yep, she was gone a fair while, and returned only with a meek smile on her face that suggested someone might be along shortly. I forgave her though, because she was a cute lady, and I’m a horribly shallow man.

I wasn’t very happy when Captain Useless toddled over though, and even less happy when I realised he already had a name and so probably wouldn’t adopt my hastily made-up one. He was as eager to help me as a sponge would be eager to clean up a huge pile of shit. I realise I’m the shit in that metaphor, but I don’t care. He acted like I was going to ruin him forever, but tried to hide his obvious contempt behind a thin veil of ‘I Know What I’m Talking About, Me’. Then, in turn, I believe the badly disguised contempt was in turn a veil for how inexplicably bad at his job he was.

“Sure!” he said, when I asked him if I could see the camera in action. I wanted a quick camera, that went from ‘Off’ to ‘Picture Of A Fat Person’ in less than three seconds, so I needed to test it for speed and quick-turn-on-ability. Cap’n Useless then did something that even I realised was a bit off – he simply unscrewed the display model from it’s security tag and handed it to me to play with.

This means the following things:
1. That he assumed I hadn’t already tried to turn it on, or that the security tag was somehow inhibiting it’s performance.
2. That he thought, beyond all comprehension, that the display models on the walls had batteries in. Personally, I think it’d be a great idea, but I can understand why companies don’t want their display cameras in working order. They’d be full of hastily taken snaps of men’s balls in under a day. Regardless, it’s something he should have known and therefore taken into account.
3. – and this might be the most important for some people – the cameras can just be unscrewed and that’s that. No further security measure in place. There was a keypad, meaning a number might need to be punched in, but it wasn’t used on this occasion.

So, to iterate – to steal a camera from the Speke branch of PC World, all you need do is unscrew it and dance past the bored, dumb staff and out of the door. I’m not condoning that, by the way…

Now might be an opportune time to mention that the man serving me was a manager, of sorts. A supervisor, at least. Maybe even a ‘Team Leader’. He was wearing the Pink Shirt Of Power, and wore a bland tie that defined his noble role of Slightly Better Than His Underlings.

Eventually I managed to explain to this King of Men that in order to try it, it needs to be turned on and carrying a battery of some sort. He understood, and toddled off to the cashier’s desk with a retail box of the camera, which was housed in a gigantic plastic lock-box with air-holes and scratches covering it’s insides. Like the boxes were once used to trap angry rats or something. It took him 15 minutes to return, stopping at every possible customer on the way to us, only to declare to each of them that ‘He Was Serving Someone’regardless if they’d acknowledge his existence or not. When he eventually arrived he was beaming – the cumbersome box was gone, and in his chubby fingers were carrying my possible future camera and the lead which would connect it to the plug socket on the wall.

“Hurrah!” I thought. We’ve made it. We’re there. The finish line is in sight. I can leave soon, and go home for a sleep.

“The battery was completely dead, mate” the man announces, still fighting with the alien idea of a ‘plug’ with a ‘wire’ on it. Between him and another girl, they manage to plug it in.

“It’ll need a minute to charge up but then you’ll be able to use it” he says. Okay, that’s fine – we’ve come this far – what’s another minute between ‘mates’, eh? Though it is a little bit odd that it’d work like that, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

WRONG! But, to give him a small amount of due, he did realisehis mistake before I had to chirp up. The battery that had been ‘dead, mate’ was still wrapped in it’s little baggy in the box. He noticed and tried to rectify his idiocy without me noticing, which didn’t work out so well for him. Luckily for me, his embarrassment got the better of him and he ran away, leaving me in the care of the girl who’d been unlucky enough to try and help out her useless boss. Sure enough, with the battery in place, it worked. Except it was slow, and I didn’t want it. A good fifteen seconds between turning it on and being able to take a photo. Even a severely obese person would be long gone by then. It just wouldn’t do. We agreed, me and the girl, that I would return to the camera section and ponder my choices, then give her a call if I found another I was interested in.

This took me less than ten seconds, as I’d already had a back-up in mind. (Turns out I bought this one, so if you’re only here to find that out, then you can stop reading now).

In that ten seconds, the girl had managed to relocate herself to the other side of the store where she was cowering behind a Tech-Guys advertisement. I actually had to wander around with the box-within-a-box for a few minutes, following the staff around only for them to run away further like pigeons scarper from beneath your feet. I even considered just walking out of the front door, box in hand – it wasn’t like they took their security seriously, after all, and the only one lightweight enough to catch me might have been the pretty one from earlier – it was almost win-win if you ignore the criminal charges. However, I was just ready to give up and return the box to it’s woeful shelf when Captain Useless reappeared from nowhere, surprisingly stealthy for a fat man in a disgusting shirt – and proffered his help once again. His help, it turned out, was to go and find the girl I’d been chasing for 5 minutes. He was gone for another ten. I did manage to squeeze in a quick technical question about SD Cards, which was answered with a terrifically confident ‘Maybe’ before he scarpered, never to be seen again. Odds are he went off to cry and comfort-eat to make him feel better about having a crappy life.

There was confusion, when the girl eventually turned up again, as she’d never removed a camera from it’s wall-mooring before, and had to be instructed (by me) on how to unscrew something. FYI – It works surprisingly like every other screw in the world – you just turned it until you achieved the required response. This girl was dim, but friendly at least, and willing to go above and beyond in the call of duty. Even if she’d only end up charging head-long into her own defences and blowing them up with a misplaced grenade – though she did display shock at the lack of security, which showed more intelligence than I’d so far experienced. She’d ruin this newly-constructed reputation within seconds, however, by jamming the battery in the wrong way and simply handing it to me, the customer, to fix. Again, I should have bolted, just to see the look on their faces. Instead I diligently stuck around, eager to fix her mess and get her out of trouble. This poor blonde girl was far too timid to survive a yelling-at from a fat man in a pink shirt. Her brain might have melted out of her eye sockets.

At least she didn’t blame it on her being blonde – there is nothing more annoyingthat a woman can say – even “I’m pregnant with your child, and oh by the way my name is…” is better than “oh I was having a blonde moment – hehehe”, when the rest of the world can see your obviously brown roots.

Happily, this story has a heart-warming ending. I managed to remove the battery, replace it as instructed, and the camera is very impressive. Then all of the women in the store whipped off their shirts and we had a giant cum-party. And also the actual price was £20 less than the advertised wall price.

Almost – ALMOST worth the hour it took me to actually buy it.