I had a long day at work yesterday. When I called the ladyfriend on the way home from the office, she offered to buy me a 6-pack on the way back from class.

“Guinness Extra Stout?” she asked, knowing it’s my favorite beer.

“If they have it, that’d be great,” I said. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Guinness Extra Stout is a maltier version of Guinness. It’s bottled, and comes without the widget that gives regular Guinness its signature head in the bottle and can versions. I assure you that Guinness Extra Stout is a real beer. ( http://www.guinness.com/us_en/beer/extraStout/)

After looking for a few minutes, my girlfriend couldn’t find any Extra Stout. She decided to ask the guy behind the counter whether they had any in the back.

“No, we don’t have any in the back, because it doesn’t exist,” he told her. His tone was far more condescending than helpful.

“It’s okay if you don’t have any,” she said. “I’ll get something else, I was just curious.”

He didn’t let up.

“Well how can we stock something that doesn’t exist? It can’t be in the back if it doesn’t exist.”

“Sir, I’m just trying to buy some beer.” By now, she had distanced herself from the counter, but he was still pushing the point.

“Don’t be embarrassed. The labels change all the time,” he said. “You made up the beer, but you can’t be expected to know any better.”

She was back by the fridge now looking for regular ol’ Guinness. A few other customers were waiting to check out, but he was still harassing her.

“Here, let’s take a look through my order book. Then we’ll know who’s right and who’s wrong,” he said. She couldn’t have cared less at this point, but she had already invested 10 minutes or so in the store and just wanted to pay and leave. He wasn’t going to let her go without feeling like he had proved something.

He flipped through his order book for a minute. When he got to the page listing Guinness, he pointed out that there was no line item for Guinness Extra Stout.

“See?! You were wrong,” he said. She was 99% certain that she was, in fact, right, but the combination of the beer’s absence in his order book and his increasingly loud and antagonistic tone had her on the verge of tears.

She brought the regular Guinness over to the counter, where a female employee, her eyes apologizing for the other guy’s behavior, rang my girlfriend up.

When she got home, my girlfriend opened the fridge to see two Guinness Extra Stouts still in the fridge from the 6-pack we bought last week. She called the Wine Press and asked to speak to the guy who had just insisted Extra Stout didn’t exist. The girl on the phone said he was in the back office and didn’t want to talk. She asked the girl on the phone to tell the guy that he had been wrong, and that he should never speak to another customer that way again. Then she hung up the phone and cried, feeling thoroughly humiliated over something that was both utterly trivial and false.

When I got home and she told me the story, I was ready to storm over there with the empty Guinness Extra Stout 6-pack holder in hand. My intent was only to subject him to a comparable level of humiliation, firstly for acting so contemptibly towards someone who, you know, wanted to give him money in exchange for a product; and secondly for being outright wrong about the existence of Guinness Extra Stout. But they were already closed.