Along one wall of our store, we have a small display rack with common office supplies for sale — Post-It pads, pens, pencils, paper clips, and things like that. A woman in her fifties comes in to make a few copies and buys a stapler kit (a stapler and a box of staples) from the display.
The following morning, she returns to the shop very irate.
Customer: “My stapler is broken! I want a refund!”
I tested the stapler and found that it was out of staples. I figured she had removed the rest of the staples when she was trying to figure out what the problem was, so I opened it up, slid in a new brick, and gave it a go. It worked perfectly. I was about to tell the woman that I didn’t know what the problem was, but when I looked up, I found her gawking at me as if I had just pulled a live weasel out of my nose.
It was then that I realized she had used up the brick of staples that was in the stapler but never put another one in, and from the look on her face, she was unaware that such a thing was even possible.
Apparently, she thought the stapler would just, I don’t know, get smaller and smaller until all of its metal was turned into staples?