Apart from the fact that today’s Heckler (in the SMH) is an excellent, hilarious piece of writing, it did make me think: how gendered is the interaction the author describes? How different would that interaction have been had she been male?
But mostly, I just love the phrase “occasional table”.
Wallaby 
Well it depends on the salesperson I think. I have seen a man being told something completely wrong by a B* salesperson when he was trying to purchase timber. Even I knew it was wrong.
But on the whole I’ve found that they tend to assume you don’t know what you want if you are female, and if you are male and work in an office and go in after work they also treat you like an idiot.
I love occasional tables. They are most excellently useful pieces of hospitality furniture.
I suspect if you ask for a quick fix, you are prey for your average HMWTHRS regardless of gender. But I’d agree that without provocation, the basic assumption is that women are more clueless than men.
Sadly, I reinforce that view most times I go in to one of those places.
My problem is that I generally have a fair idea of what things do, but I have no idea what their names are. (I blame my father: “can you hand me the thingamewhatsit?” “this?” “NO, the thingamewhatsit!”)
So I tend to go into hardware stores and say things like: “I need a tool that kind of looks like [amateur description] to do [amateur description].”
Or I walk in purposefully, get what I want, and leave. Which is a reaction to spending way too much time as a kid (and still, occasionally, now) following my father around hardware stores while he wandered and browsed in what always seemed like a fairly aimless fashion to me.