Though this was a long time ago, it still makes me angry. I went to a store that sold flooring to get an estimate for sheet vinyl for our bathroom floor; we were building a new house and doing a lot of the work ourselves. When I first went in, the woman at the counter said that the manager was at lunch and maybe I should come back later with my husband. I thought that was kind of odd, but I told her I’d wait for the manager. He gave me a price for the flooring, but when I asked about seams, as I’d only put down flooring squares and not sheet vinyl, he ALSO told me to come back with my husband. When I asked why, he said, “Because if I explain it to you and you go home and tell him, you’ll get it wrong.” I was 25, a college graduate who had also done a summer at Oxford. No one had ever talked to me like I was stupid before. BTW, his store went out of business a few years later.
