Leatherman's, the real story behind the story

Portland used to be a maddening place to do business. There were two sorts of uglinesses that over the years were identified with "Old Portland", the Stumptown Attitude and the Old Runaround.
You would walk into a store, say Meier and Frank's, or the hat shop, or, say, Store for Men, and the little old lady in the cardigan would look you up and down and when she finally said may I help you what she clearly meant, no effort to hide it, was what business could you possibly have with this fine establishment, you shabby, ignorant, unacceptable flyspeck?
That's the Stumptown attitude, and it still exists, particularly at Stumptown Coffee, where the variation is " What totally hip thing can I do for you that you will neither understand nor appreciate?"
Then there's the Ol' Runaround, " no, we don't have that at this store, try over at Lloyd Center, or No, he's left for today (2 pm), you might try calling tomorrow and see if he can make time, or no, it's not in yet, try back Thursday."
So when I got to the Leatherman's teak paneled front desk with the gin-blossom fifty something lady in the cardigan and she said, no, they handle all the walk-ins over at the retail store, I was on familiar grounds. I am proud of myself that I did not offer to swarm over the counter and shove my worn-out multitool up her worn-out snatch. I left.
But I was so fucking tired, and hungry, and just about out of gas that I truly couldn't have made the trip back to Cascade Place by the Ikea. So I went back in, struggling for a way to break this person, ten years younger than me, to get the stick out of her ass and do the right thing. I found grounds for appeal in the paperwork I had the good sense to print out and fill in, which had the merchant circle address on it, the office not the store, and I appealed to her chick solidarity with just a hint of malaise and I threw myself upon the mercy-of-her-court and the appeal to her vanity and power were just enough to root out the nonsense. But it was close.
And then, like the grace of God in a sinful city, there was a Burger King on the next corner, and the world was a lovely place once again.