Hand Coding

I had a team lunch at Cafe Brazil today (the one off 75 & Campbell in Richardson) and I planned on stopping by NerdBooks afterwards since they’re on the way back to the office. NerdBooks, for those who haven’t heard of them, is a bookstore specializing in computer and technology books. They have an online store (with discounts in line with other online bookstores), but they also have a physical store as well.

Up until recently, I couldn’t have recommended them highly enough. In some ways, it was the best of both worlds — you could get significant discounts on computer books (like an online store) but you could stop by the store to get it the same day (like a brick-and-mortar store). For instance, I was going there today to pick up O’Reilly’s Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger (just to get a better feel for the command line). It has a list price of $19.95, but NerdBooks was selling it for $11.57. And, with no shipping charges, I thought that was a pretty good deal.

Anyhow, I drove there after lunch, parked my car and walked up to the main entrance. As I opened the door, a Marmaduke-looking dog came jogging towards me. (To be sure, I’ve never had a dog, so it might not have been the same breed as Marmaduke.) The door didn’t have a self-closing mechanism, so it took me a second to realize that I needed to close it manually. As I did, the dog slowly approached the doorway and poked his head out.

“Is he an outside dog?”, I asked, attempting to project my voice into the store. Not more than a few seconds later, a man wearing nylon track pants and a fitted long-sleeved ribbed shirt came running along. He was apparently the owner of the store and, judging by the size of his neck, I was guessing that he lifted more than just books in his spare time. He then reached down and tugged the dog away from the entranceway and finished closing the door. You might think that he’d proceed to needlessly apologize for his playful dog as he welcomed me to his store. That was not the case.

Rather, he took this opportunity to berate me for the next two to three minutes about how I treated his dog. Most of it was a blur of grimacing and hand waving, but a few of his phrases included these tidbits:

• “How could you let him get out? […] ”
• “People open this door all the way and it hits the side of the building! […]” [I guess this was in reference to the non-self-closing door which, though it threw me off at first, I didn’t run into this issue.]
• “I don't mean to be an asshole, but I gotta protect my dog! […]”
• “This isn’t Nordstrom’s, you know. […]” [I’m not sure what he was getting at on this one.]

I was taken aback by these words being shouted in my general direction. All I had planned on doing was walking in, buying the book, and walking out. Instead, my perception of NerdBooks dropped like a stone. After the blowhard stopped talking, I simply turned around and walked out. I will not be shopping there again.