A Social Experiment

A few weeks ago, Cricket*, a female coworker, and I were trading stories about male customers who can't seem to trust our answers about guns and ammo because we are women. One of the guys actually coined a phrase for it: "penis confirmation". 

Every single woman in the department has been a victim of it. The interactions range from a man asking a question and quasi-stealthily finding a guy to ask also all the way to a man asking a female employee a question, then completely walking away from her to ask a guy before she can finish her answer. I even had a customer ask me to give the phone to "one of the guys because they'll know the answer."

Now, I have never thought this to be the brightest idea that a man has ever had, you know, since we work with guns and all that. 

Well, Sven*, one of the gun counter guys, had a brilliant idea while he was listening to Cricket and I bitch about penis confirmation: make it so that there was one day that only women were scheduled in the department and see what the male customers would do.

Needless to say, we loved the idea and rounded up the ladies to get on board with the idea. Then, we put it to the scheduler. She loved it too, and made it happen. (We didn't want to tell anybody with real power because we were afraid they'd shut us down, but our manager found out and thought it was hilarious. I don't think anybody told the store manager though, but there's different reasons there.)

Well, when the day arrived, we all waited excitedly for 5pm to roll around so we could say goodbye to the guys and start our experiment (I'll admit, we called it that because it sounds nicer and more professional than just wanting to screw with our customer's heads). It was a Tuesday, so foot traffic was slow... and we didn't get the reaction we hoped for. There were a few men who looked around in some slight confusion, but there were no penis confirmation moments, much to our disappointment.

Although, we did find out that we all work really well together as a team and got more done as a department than we normally do. I guess, in our case, it's the boys who bring the drama and the girls who get shit done. (J/k... kinda....they know I love them).

I think the general consensus was that we want to keep trying our "experiment" to see of we can finally get the reaction we are hoping for.

We're cruel, I know but...

"Hell hath no fury...."