Odd customer questions

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Today I had a customer ask me where he could find the nearby sports bar with 4000 TVs.

Uhhh, yeah. I can barely even imagine a sports bar with THAT many TVs, that would be one huge, crazy place.

He's not the only one with an odd request, I've also had customers looking for the following:

- An old time diner (I can't even think of any in this TOWN)
- An Adult store (there's none within 5 miles)
- An "Exotic clothing" store they claimed existed nearby (now that one I'd like to see myself! )
- A Wal-Mart (this was not odd but funny since there is a Wal-mart right across the street that is plainly visible.

[superhotelworker]

LMAO
"Where's the nearest chinese place?" *points outside and across the road* Duh?

Ooh we have one of your adult stores, up the street from my house, otherwise it's across the river. LOL
And.. the Exotic clothing for me is downtown. <3

LOL I'm trying very hard to picture a sports bar with 4000 tv's.. my head.

[jjllbb]

- A Wal-Mart (this was not odd but funny since there is a Wal-mart right across the street that is plainly visible.

I had a customer just like that once. She asked where the nearest Olive Garden was:

Me: Oh it's right across the street
Her: So i go down the street and...
Me: No, it's directly across from us.
Her: Is it near the mall (which is down the street from my store)
Me: No, you can see it from here! *I point to the window at the front of the store*
Her: So I just go...
Me: Out the exit door. Look straight.

That was a big LOL moment for me.

[superhotelworker]

LOL I'm telling you, listening is turning into a SC Superpower.

[Pedersen]

Today I had a customer ask me where he could find the nearby sports bar with 4000 TVs.

4000 TVs? Ummm... wow? I got curious, so I did some math. If we assume that they are all very small tvs, such a the 7" Viore widescreen, all of them packed as closely together as possible, and using a 10 foot ceiling, and they are resting on shelves that are 1/2" thick, we wind up with 21 of these stacked floor to ceiling. We wind up with 191 columns. At 8.7 inches, we get 138.5 feet of wall, covered floor to ceiling, with no gaps.

Now, if we decide to remove the bottom half of the wall (so that people won't be looking at the tv by their toes, or accidentally kicking it), it doubles the length out to 277 feet. For anybody in metric land, that's 84 meters of wall. Such a bar would want to make sure all TVs are visible all the time (since this is a selling point), so likely they'd all be on the outer wall of the seating area. This means the seating area will have to be about 60 feet/side. No space for the kitchen, either, this is just the accessible to the public area.

So, it's possible, raw square footage wise, for such a place to exist. TVs can be had small enough.

Price: The one place I've found that tv, it cost $150. That translates to $600,000. Even if they get some sort of volume discount to cut the price in half, we're still talking $300,000 dollars just for the TVs.

Weight wise, We're looking at 5200 pounds (2363kg)of weight for the TVs alone. That doesn't cover the weight of the shelving, nor of the added construction cost to attach those shelves to walls and have those walls capable of supporting the weight.

Power consumption is the really interesting part. It consumes up to 11W of power per hour, and is meant to be run in a car (you know it's going very low power then). 11W*4000 is 44,000W, or 44KW. If their electric provider is charging them 7cents/kilowatt hour, you're looking at $3.08/hr just to power the TVs. If the place is open for 8 hours/day, 30 days/month, their electric bill is $740/month just for the TVs.

Oh, and the heat? Even if only half the electricity consumed gets converted to waste heat, we're looking at 75,000 BTUs/hr. You can adequately heat a room by applying 10 to 15 BTUs/sq ft. The TVs alone would be able to heat a 5000 sq ft room. The room in question is, at biggest, 3600 sq ft. The problem is cooling the room back down. The bar would need 6.25 tons of cooling capacity just for the TVs. This doesn't account for summer weather, doors opening/closing, body heat from people, kitchen heat, etc.

So, you've got a customer asking you where a fairly sizeable bar is that consumes $740/month of electricity, uses north 6.25 tons of cooling, and has walls that can support an extra 2.5 tons of weight being attached to them. And all of that assumes these silly 7" TVs. What happens at 9", or 14"? The bar would collapse on itself with the weight, or be unable to afford the electric bill for the TVs and the AC units.

Sorry, I rambled a bit. Just got carried away with figuring out just how ridiculous this bar would have to be.

Damn. That's one impressive bar.

[mikoyan29]

LMAO
"Where's the nearest chinese place?" *points outside and across the road* Duh?

Ooh we have one of your adult stores, up the street from my house, otherwise it's across the river. LOL
And.. the Exotic clothing for me is downtown. <3

LOL I'm trying very hard to picture a sports bar with 4000 tv's.. my head.

From what I've heard the ESPN bar might have that many.

[infinitemonkies]

Whoever said "there are no stupid questions" never worked customer service

[emax4]

"4000 TVs? Oh, you're looking for the (TV Manufacturer) name, down the road..."

[alcaholjunkie]

Whoever said "there are no stupid questions" never worked customer service

"There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots." ^_^

On a related note, when one of my foremen said "there are no stupid questions", I asked him how many cups of sugar it takes to get to the moon. ^_^ He called me an F'ing idiot, lol.

[Dilorenzo]

4000 TVs? Ummm... wow? I got curious, so I did some math. If we assume that they are all very small tvs, such a the 7" Viore widescreen, all of them packed as closely together as possible, and using a 10 foot ceiling, and they are resting on shelves that are 1/2" thick, we wind up with 21 of these stacked floor to ceiling. We wind up with 191 columns. At 8.7 inches, we get 138.5 feet of wall, covered floor to ceiling, with no gaps.

Damnit. I was gonna use that to kill some time, and you went and ruinded it

[Magpie]

Damnit. I was gonna use that to kill some time, and you went and ruinded it

He even got the heat, which has always been my favourite one to look at. (Unless I'm asked about powering a car with hamsters, and then I look for how much shit they generate. Did you know there's stuff that google doesn't seem to want to find?)

[Wenchie]

My office is in the same building as a weight watchers. In fact, we're in "The Weight Watchers Building" since it says "Weight Watchers" in the upper right corner of the actual building.

Giving directions to people to come in for our classes, I always include "We're in the Weight Watchers Building."

SC: "How close are you to the Weight Watcher's Building?"
Me: "We're in the same building."
SC: "So you're near the building."
Me: "We're IN the building."
SC: "How close are you to the Weight Watcher's Building?"
Me: "We're upstairs. In. The. Same. Building."
SC: "But, I'm not sure where to go."
Me: "Do you know where the Weight Watcher's Building is?"
SC: "Yes."
Me: "Ok, so drive to that building and park in their parking lot. Go in the front door. Take the stairs up to the second floor. They'll be a sign pointing you to our class."
SC: "So.... you're going to wait for me at the Weight Watcher's building and then take me to your building?"
Me: "Yes... that's what I'm going to do."
SC: "You guys should have simpler directions! It's too confusing!"
Me:

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

4000 TVs? Ummm... wow? I got curious, so I did some math. If we assume that they are all very small tvs, such a the 7" Viore widescreen, all of them packed as closely together as possible, and using a 10 foot ceiling, and they are resting on shelves that are 1/2" thick, we wind up with 21 of these stacked floor to ceiling. We wind up with 191 columns. At 8.7 inches, we get 138.5 feet of wall, covered floor to ceiling, with no gaps.

Now, if we decide to remove the bottom half of the wall (so that people won't be looking at the tv by their toes, or accidentally kicking it), it doubles the length out to 277 feet. For anybody in metric land, that's 84 meters of wall. Such a bar would want to make sure all TVs are visible all the time (since this is a selling point), so likely they'd all be on the outer wall of the seating area. This means the seating area will have to be about 60 feet/side. No space for the kitchen, either, this is just the accessible to the public area.

So, it's possible, raw square footage wise, for such a place to exist. TVs can be had small enough.

Price: The one place I've found that tv, it cost $150. That translates to $600,000. Even if they get some sort of volume discount to cut the price in half, we're still talking $300,000 dollars just for the TVs.

Weight wise, We're looking at 5200 pounds (2363kg)of weight for the TVs alone. That doesn't cover the weight of the shelving, nor of the added construction cost to attach those shelves to walls and have those walls capable of supporting the weight.

Power consumption is the really interesting part. It consumes up to 11W of power per hour, and is meant to be run in a car (you know it's going very low power then). 11W*4000 is 44,000W, or 44KW. If their electric provider is charging them 7cents/kilowatt hour, you're looking at $3.08/hr just to power the TVs. If the place is open for 8 hours/day, 30 days/month, their electric bill is $740/month just for the TVs.

Oh, and the heat? Even if only half the electricity consumed gets converted to waste heat, we're looking at 75,000 BTUs/hr. You can adequately heat a room by applying 10 to 15 BTUs/sq ft. The TVs alone would be able to heat a 5000 sq ft room. The room in question is, at biggest, 3600 sq ft. The problem is cooling the room back down. The bar would need 6.25 tons of cooling capacity just for the TVs. This doesn't account for summer weather, doors opening/closing, body heat from people, kitchen heat, etc.

So, you've got a customer asking you where a fairly sizeable bar is that consumes $740/month of electricity, uses north 6.25 tons of cooling, and has walls that can support an extra 2.5 tons of weight being attached to them. And all of that assumes these silly 7" TVs. What happens at 9", or 14"? The bar would collapse on itself with the weight, or be unable to afford the electric bill for the TVs and the AC units.

Sorry, I rambled a bit. Just got carried away with figuring out just how ridiculous this bar would have to be.

Damn. That's one impressive bar.

I didn't nail it down to quite the exact numbers you did but I was pondering the logistics of such a bar after the customer left.

[Pedersen]

Damnit. I was gonna use that to kill some time, and you went and ruinded it

Sorry about that. I got a little bit carried away there. Course, 7in TVs are kinda useless. Would be interesting to know those numbers for a realistically sized TV for a bar.

He even got the heat, which has always been my favourite one to look at. (Unless I'm asked about powering a car with hamsters, and then I look for how much shit they generate. Did you know there's stuff that google doesn't seem to want to find?)

Okay, two things occur to me there:

1. I've known that finding answers on Google can be hard, depending on what you're searching for. Can't figure out how to search for "how much shit does one hamster make per month?"

2. I'm truly troubled by the desire to know this. Who actually thinks of these things? And do I need gloves if I share an internet forum with them?

[dalesys]

(Unless I'm asked about powering a car with hamsters, and then I look for how much shit they generate.)

How much ham could a hamshit shit, if a hamshit could shit ham?



Good thing it's not bacon!