A countess, various mad old men, stuck-up prats - you've got to love my customers!

It never ceases to amaze me what sheer variety there is among my customers. All walks of life barely covers it.

There was a time when I thought of them in terms of their knowledge about the CDs they were buying (from those who come looking for this nice tune they heard on the radio to wanting to hear the new Angela Hewitt recording), but the lines are getting increasingly blurred. The fact is, only a small number of customers are truly memorable, and usually for the wrong reasons.

A few random examples drawn from three years' work in this industry:
- the woman looking for a Schubert Lied, only in Italian, something to do with a boy and a horn. The sexual innuendo didn't strike me till later as I was convinced she meant "Des Knaben Wunderhorn", which is neither Schubert nor in Italian. She would have none of it, insisting that she couldn't stand Mahler, until a couple of my colleagues backed me up unprompted, at which point she listened to the CD and, most unusually in these cases, backed down. And apologised profusely.
- one of those classic malaproprisms which I feel ought to enter common parlance: a customer came in looking for a CD of piano music by Lamborghini. He meant Einaudi, but the car allusion was really rather wonderful.
- the man who wanted to replace a Beethoven LP he had many years ago. No idea what the music was, but it had a landscape on the cover.
- if you know of anyone besides Schubert whose fourth symphony is (a) in C minor and (b) known as the "Tragic", please let me know. Apparently it wasn't the piece this one woman was looking for, but then she did think it could be Brahms' fourth, despite that work being in a different key and having no nickname.
- a slightly creepy semi-regular with a very bad case of builder's bum (and not an attractive one at that) asking me why I was playing jazz, apparently oblivious to the fact the jazz section is in with classical. I explained that I had to be selective with it, choosing artists from the 50s and 60s, but he went on to say he didn't like jazz, full stop. I left the CD on.
- similar sort of thing with another semi-regular who asked what opera DVD I was playing. I don't know why he did, to be honest, 'cos the moment I told him it was "The turn of the screw" he said very sniffily "I thought it was, I can't stand that opera." Again, it stayed on - spite can be a wonderful thing.
- a man we only ever knew as Flatcap, who stank to high heaven and invariably appeared out of nowhere (we had a feeling there was a portal next to the classical DVDs), though he always left via the lift. Once returned some porn, claiming it was too funny.
- Mr Graham (apparently not even his real name), an even smellier man whose stench you can still detect five minutes after he's gone. Can be borderline rude, stopping only just short of making personal insults, if he deems the service he's receiving to be under par. Thankfully he seems to have taken his custom elsewhere, though I feel I should probably go round to his new haunt and apologise to its owners.
- Mr M. Hardly ever buys anything but shows up every weekday, almost like clockwork, between 4:30 and 5:30pm. On the old side, a bit eccentric (probably not all there) and absolutely obsessed with anything loud, Tchaikovsky in particular - NEVER get him into a discussion about Mount Doom in "Return of the King". Invariably asks, looking up at the plasma screens behind the counter, "is that an opera?". There are times I'm tempted to reply "no, Mr M, it's a duck-billed platypus", just to see how he reacts, if at all.

There are more. Many more, in fact, but those'll do for now. (The countess, if you were wondering, was only memorable because she was a countess.)