This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

If you've ever worked in any sort of service job, you've probably heard the phrase,

the customer is always right.

It's a truism that is hard to believe when you're dealing with an irate person or someone who simply doesn't like you.

And the saying isn't true in the literal sense.

The customer is rarely actually right all the time.

But the customer is the one with the money, so they're the one who must be appeased.

And if you fail to do so, you may still hear from a customer for days, weeks, or months

later,

especially if they're not happy with your product or your behavior.

To quote one particularly irate customer complaint,

what do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt?

Actually, that's not something a recent customer said.

That's a customer from over 3,000 years ago.

I'd like to take you back to 1750 BCE to the ancient city-states of Err in ancient Mesopotamia. There, a man named Nani spoke to a merchant about purchasing some copper

ingots. The merchant, whose name was A. Nasir, wasn't just a copper trader. He also sold

textiles and foodstuffs on occasion. But his primary specialty was copper. At least that's the

...