Horror Stories from my Coffee Shop - Ch. 2

I had a really busy day yesterday at work. In my restaurant/coffee shop/cyber cafe/bar, I am the final authority during my scheduled shift (and sometimes for a short while afterwards). I am the cashier, the coffee girl, the server, the cook, the busser, the dishwasher, and the bartender; I do it all. Mostly because at any given time, there's actually only one person ON shift here. And yesterday, my final till ringout from my shift was just about twice that of an 'average' day. So it was busy - but good. Right up until my very last customer of the evening.

She walked in while I was shelving some stock my boss had just brought in, and my very first thought was "You may not laugh at your customers!" She looked like she had fallen out of the 80's, and not on a good day. For starters, she was wearing this sweater. Pink doesn't even began to describe it; it was somwhere between salmon and coral, and it hurt my teeth to look directly at her. She was also wearing capri pants (and yes, last time I checked, it was still -10 outside), and had about 3 inches of ash brown roots beneath her platinum blonde home-bleach job. Apparently, though, her hair colour choice (however sporadic) was in earnest; she'd come in to use the computers, but had exactly no idea how to do so. So I spent the last 20 minutes of my shift trying (and believe me, it was extremely trying) to help her out. She couldn't remember her password for her email, she couldn't remember her user name for her email, and she didn't understand why, when she started a new hotmail account, the message she was expecting (and had, presumably, come in to the cyber cafe to check for) wasn't there; I honestly thought that my face was going to crack under the strain of repressed laughter.

I know that not everyone has more than an extremely basic understading of how computers work; I know that there are people in this very city who have never used one; but there are certain basic concepts that, to me at least, are only logical. Such as, you have to know the address you're retrieving your mail from in order to retrieve said mail. This is true for the world as it exists outside computers; it follows, therefore, that it would also be true for the world OF computers. People like this woman are why I classify being here as work.