perhaps you should have went to a hardware store for a door seal or a plumbing shop for a commode seal or possibly Grainger or MacMasters catalogs for just about anything else of a mechanical nature... not to mention Christmas seal; Easter seal; fur seal; trained circus seal; etc...
most auto parts dealers sell parts for cars and trucks and those parts are listed by the vehicles they are supposed to fit which very often have multiple applications... it is not unusual at all for these parts to have multiple cross-references...
the clerks are seldom being paid the same salaries as the engineers who are working on their own junk and they are doing the best they can with what they have to work with whether it be a rack of old parts manuals or an unforgiving computer or some half-scrawled number on a scrap of greasy paper or the back of the hand... they don't own the place they just work there...
if they were even remotely as brilliant as most of their customers perhaps they would be top mechanics in a shop and earning the kind of money the backyard mechanic doesn't want to pay out...
these clerks are just trying to make a living like most of us and run into the same problems we do when they need to buy something for their own use...
it also helps to be able to supply enough accurate information so that somebody else can discern what is needed and not have to go through a mind reading session everytime a customer comes through the door...
bill in VA