Service With A Smile

I bought a guitar last summer, so I can learn to wail1 on it like a ninja. The strings rusted out while I was in Ithaca, so I went to the guitar store where I bought it to ask them how to change the strings. (It did not come with a manual.) The guy I asked for the lesson sold me a set of strings and then took my guitar. He cut one of the strings with a pair of scissors2, and unwound the first half of the string from the tuning peg. Then he tried to remove the other half from the bridge. Oops. After a bit of fumbling he related to me that he was not familiar with the type of bridge on my guitar, so he took it over to another counter where some other sales reps were. He came back in five or ten minutes saying that he couldn't change the string because they didn't have the correct size allen wrench. So then I went home with a five-string guitar.

1. Or should it be, "whale"? Google seems ambivalent, both turn up hits. And both words make sense, wail, to make a high pitched crying sound, or whale, to hit repeatedly, or thrash. I suspect though that "whale" only makes sense accidentally, and it's really supposed to be "wail".

2. As I later learned this operation is not normally necessary when changing a guitar string.