Hey, buddy, can you get me a real job?

So my IBM Thinkpad, the one that I bought on my way out the door from IBM in 2004, turned into a Brickpad. I suspect, but can't readily prove, that a replacement battery that I'd installed over the weekend toasted the innards. The laptop ran fine for a day and then started crashing intermittently and finally wouldn't boot, read a CD, or so anything other than complain that various components were inaccessible. I brought it to our local fix-it guys; their diagnostics and tinkering confirmed that it was game over.
A bit of research with Consumer Reports and online price comparisons brought me to Best Buy, where I picked up a Dell Studio model something-or-other with a lot of screen, disk, and memory. The salesguy was a pleasant, easy-going young man who listened well and answered my questions clearly and without hype. He did a very good job.
Of course, part of his job is in selling extras, which includes an online backup/recovery plan for your data. I mentioned that my wife works for EMC and so we use their Mozy online service.
"EMC, huh?" he asked. "Is their IT department hiring?"
I explained what I knew, that salaried employees were being asked to take a 5% pay cut for the rest of this year. (This is public information, reported here in the Boston Globe.) I had seen some very specific sales and sales engineering positions available, jobs where you worked for EMC but were on-site at customer locations almost full-time.
The salesguy said that he wished he'd applied to EMC before graduation rather than afterwards and now, well, now he has this job. As I said, he did a very good job. I'll fill out the customer survey and let them know that I was treated well. Nevertheless, a job at Best Buy is still just a job at Best Buy.