I was checking my referral logs and I found out that someone posted my earlier rant about personal information gathering to a Yahoo message board.

Someone calling himself silence245 had this to say:

and one more thing…

this is probably the woman I tried to help on Saturday.

From the second she walked in the door… I knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. She was incredibly rude to me…
I approached her to see if she needed assistance and she snapped at me saying that she could find it herself.
Then, in an all-to-often ironic twist, she soon after approached me seeking help after she couldn’t “find it herself”

Not.  I realize you may have just been venting, but when you assume you make an ASS of U and ME.

The first thing to know is that while the given name Aubrey has been used for females, it is primarily a male name.  Of course, I’m used to this by now.  The only thing that really sets me off is when someone calls me Audrey, which is a female name and shows that they don’t have enough respect for me to learn my correct name. 

The next thing is that I am very rarely rude to sales staff, even if they are being a smartass or exhibiting a bad attitude.  I learned years ago that being polite can often get you what you want more easily than being rude or flying off the handle (although I admit having done it a few times in the past).  If I’m upset by something outside the store I don’t take it out on the staff.  In the case of Office Max and the ZIP code incident, I didn’t say or do anything rude to the cashier.  I simply stated that I would not participate in the survey.  That was all there was to it.

In those rare (these days) cases where the sales staff is so incompetent or rude that it upsets me, I generally tell them that I’ve changed my mind about the sale and leave.  I generally try to avoid confrontations.  If they can’t treat me with courtesy and respect, I simply go somewhere else.  If the problem is not as serious, I have found that a polite word said with a bit of quiet anger will usually take care of things. 

And finally, when the sales staff asks me if I need help, I generally say “No, thanks” or “I’m just looking.”  There’s no need to be rude (even after the fifth salesperson does this ).  If I’d come into your store, you’d probably never know I’d been there (unless you remembered my refusal to participate in your store’s information gathering efforts).

Update: This whole retail thing isn’t one of my primary concerns.  My interests lie more in freedom and libertarianism.  It’s also interesting to note the amount of juvenile name-calling and snarky attitude that you get when you decide to break from the herd.  The link to the article was posted to another Yahoo board where someone posted a scarastic (I hope—maybe he/she was really that ignorant; I shudder at the thought) reply that implied that I was some kind of paranoid redneck.  Oh well, I guess some people just don’t get it (and probably never will).  I think I’m done with this topic for a while, though.  There are more important battles right now, especially this stupidity over so-called ballistic “fingerprinting”.