Best buy bye bye

Years ago, I moved in with a friend when we both needed a fresh start.

She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who lived in the apartment with her. So she needed a new roommate to help pay the bills. I moved in, and we instantly bonded over our workaholic natures and love of Golden Girls. I was newly single as well, and we served as a good distraction for one another.

A few months later, she struck up a relationship with a college classmate. Things went well, but he moved back to New England a few months later when school let out for the summer. They decided to try the whole longterm thing and certainly gave it their best shot.

This is was in the dark times, when the world of communications was dominated by landlines and long distance charges. To mitigate the costs, they scheduled a time to talk each night. However, our phone was located between the kitchen and the living room, which gave her absolutely no privacy.

The next holiday season, I bought her a cordless phone. It was the best of the worst possible phones, with fancy features like caller ID and the ability to store 10 whole phone numbers in memory. Truly top of the line, but the garbage quality price of $20, which was in my price range.

We did a gift exchange when school reconvened. I was so excited for her to open her phone and know she would have the freedom of talking to her boyfriend in the privacy of her own bedroom, all without having to even remember his phone number! A touch of a button did the trick for her.

“Very funny,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“This is a joke, right?”

“No, not at all. What’s the problem?”

“There’s no phone in the box.”

In all of my excitement to get her this gift, it never occurred to me that the box may have been a little light. Components of the phone, such as the base, were in there, but the phone itself was not. I decided to resolve this immediately for her.

I reached out to a friend and asked if he would want to come with me to the big box store so I could get the phone replaced. He was in. So, I picked him up, and we headed to the store. The parking lot was jammed and the customer service line was easily 25people deep.

Mistake number two: it did not dawn on me that the place would be swamped with people returning and exchanging unwanted gifts from the holiday season.

It must have taken at least an hour to get to the front of the line and plead my case, but the manager clearly was not having it.

“I bought this phone for my roommate, but the phone wasn’t in the box.”

“And?”

“I’d like if I could get the phone, please.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t.”

“Why?”

“Cause that’s not how this works. You can reach out to the manufacturer and see if they will fix the problem for you.”

“The manufacturer is in South Korea. How am I supposed to do that?”

“Not my problem.”

“I don’t understand. I need you to help me resolve this.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Not going to.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Look, how do I know you’re not a scam artist who goes around from store to store saying that part of the phone is missing from the box and they replace it and then you sell the phone to make a profit.”

“Because it’s a cheap $20 phone? It’s not like this is a hot commodity on the black market, I have to imagine.”

“It’s their problem to fix.”

“It was their job to get the phone to you. It was your job to make sure the phone was there when you had it up for sale. This is not on the manufacturer. If the phone was not in the box when it got to your store, that’s on you.”

This continued on for 10 more minutes. I am a very calm person, but we were at each other’s throats during this heated exchange.”

“This is bullshit,” I shouted as I stomped away from the counter.”

My friend ask what happened. I told him that they would not replace the phone and that my only option was to reach out to this company in South Korea and ask them to send me a phone.

“That’s not your only option, you know?”

Angry and irrational, we came up with a halfbaked scheme to take the missing component from another box. First, he went down the aisle, took a phone out of the box, looked at it as if he was inspecting it prior to purchasing it. Later, I would go down that same aisle, snag the phone, and put it in the box.

We executed the plan flawlessly, I thought. We had each purchased an item or two, and got in line to check out. He checked out before I did and, when he made it to the security stand by the front door, he noticed all of the store’s cameras were pointed directly at me. He looked up at me, shook his head to let me know there was an issue, and I waved for him to walk out.

The cashier made some cockamamie story up about needing to replace the paper in her printer that clearly still had paper. She walked out of line, into an office, and then returned right back without any printer paper. She had alerted security that I was the guy and that I had the phone.

I checked out and walked towards the door. As I got closer, security guards started closing in on me. I looked back at the other set of doors on the other side of the store. It was empty, since the entire security detail was surrounding me, as if I had just committed some heinous crime.

I turned around and began walking towards the other door, muttering, “fuck it” under my breath. Like a school of fish, they all turned in unison and formation towards the other door.

At this point, I knew I was never going to get my phone and that I would get my money’s worth another way. So, I began running down the aisles of the store with my hands spread out in the air like the wings of a plane. I was playing like a little kid and these overweight adults could not keep up with me. I made a mockery of them.

They were not smart. They did not even consider breaking up into teams and cutting me off at the pass. They mindlessly followed me around the store until I decided I got my money’s worth in entertainment and stopped.

This was completely new territory to me. I had never really broken a law before and felt that this was a grey area, since I actually paid for the phone they refused to give me. One security guard approached me, panting, and asked me to come with him. I was not nervous, even though this was completely out of character for me. I just shook my head up and down and followed him to a small room.

In there sat a sad middle-age man who played the solo role of bad cop. He was ending his call with the police when he looked up disapprovingly and slammed down the phone.

“Sit down,” he said, kicking a chair over to me.

So, I did. He asked for my identification and I tossed my wallet over to him. He looked my drivers license over for a while, noting my last name and zip code.

“Oh, so, you’re a Deefeeo,” he said with a cocky smirk. “From South Philly.”

I responded with a snarky little laugh.

“I know the Deefeeo families in South Philly.”

He threw out a bunch of Italian sounding first names, hoping one of them would stick, that he’d get my dad’s name right eventually. He never did.

“I can call them right now.”

“OK.”

“I can. Don’t tempt me.”

“OK.”

I picked up a copy of Maxim that had Jennifer Love Hewitt on the front. I must admit that I gawked at the images and stopped paying attention to him.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The police entered, put me in handcuffs, walked me out to their cruiser, and put me in the back.

I caught my friend out of the corner of my eye booking it until he was out of site.

“What happened?” one officer asked.

I told him the whole story. He cracked a smile more than once.

“This is not the first time we have had to deal with something like this here,” said the other cop. “They’re a bunch of assholes.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

He repeated, “They are a bunch of assholes.”

I nodded in approval.

The first cop ran my information while we talked.

“Look, here’s the deal,” he said. “You seem like a good kid. You don’t have a record, and we don’t think you stole a phone or are running some black market scam. Here is how things will go down: You will do a correspondence course on shoplifting and nothing will go on your record.”

I did not know what to say, other than to express my utter gratitude for their help and their belief in me. I felt such a sense of relief.

The correspondence course is, well, another story.