I Have Once Again Decided To Be Difficult

Scent Notes: Black cherry, spices, peaches and cream, and valencia orange.

[Based on the events of a true story]

[Okay it was me, this happened to me…]

Ariel's boots clicked on the sidewalk. As she pushed the door to the locksmith open, a little bell rang. All around, there are thousands of examples of locks, uncut keys, a few clever hide-a-key setups (and a few very fake-looking rocks).

She simply needed a new key fob for her car (an extremely common car, mind you).

As she approached the counter the guy standing on the other side asked how he could help her, and she said, "Well, I just need a new key fob. Mine is broken." The guy gave her a blank stare and then his face contorted into the perfect caricature of I-don't-really-want-to-do-that-right-now.

"Um," he said, "what car is it?" So she gave him the vehicle info and he just kept staring at her, and finally he said, "We don't have that."

Ariel realized then that she would need to be difficult about this.

[I know, this story is riveting, hopefully you are feeling as annoyed as I was when this guy tried to act like he couldn't help me when, in fact, I knew he could. Anyways, back to the plot…]

She looked him right in the eye and said, "Yeah, you have to order it. It takes 3 weeks to get here."

He looks at another guy in the shop and asks, "She needs a key fob, can we do that?" clearly trying to get out of the whole thing, but the other guy (WHO HAD BEEN LISTENING THE WHOLE TIME) was like "Yeah, but we'd have to order it. It takes 3 weeks. Then we'd have to program it." (As if Ariel knew nothing about car keys in the 21st century. Good grief.)

She stares at them.

They stare at her.

"Okay well can we order it then?" She asks, finally exasperated. "I need a new key," she says, not letting their weaponized incompetence stop her.

The second guy says, "I'll check." Ariel wondered why checking wasn’t the first move.

They both walk into the back and out of sight, and for a full minute she stands there. Then one of them comes back out and asks which car it was again, and when she tells him he wanders out of sight again. They return, and one of them says, "Yeah we can order it, it will be about 3 weeks."

The difference between selling her a key and not selling her a key was a simple system search. She knew that. They were not fooling her.

"Okay great," she says, seething. How annoying to have to fork over hundreds of dollars to these bird brains.

They scrawl her info sloppily on a carbon copy notepad and tell her to come back in 3 weeks.

Being difficult isn't always fun, but sometimes it's the only way to get shit done.