True Tales from Retail: The Quiet Phone

So this woman walks into the store late in my shift. The woman is a bit disconnected looking to start with. Maybe her hair was teased, maybe she was electrocuted on the way. She has white hair and a vacant look in her eye. She doesn't look elderly, though, just a little out-of-it. She approaches my associate, Wall.e, with a dinosaur of a portable phone.

Now, when I say dinosaur, you have to understand that 10 years in technology time is FOREVER. She has a 10 year old portable phone and she's claiming that we sold her a bad battery. I don't hear what is going on, but I see evident frustration in Wall.e's shoulders, so I step in.


She's claiming that the battery we sold her to replace her old one must be defective because her phone is too quiet. An alarm goes off in my head. Technology of the turn of the century is not going to be programmed well enough to reduce functionality to save battery life when it is low. If the device works at all, the battery is fine. I suggest the first logical explanation in my mind for why changing the battery could suddenly decrease the volume. I suggest that the default volume might have been set when the phone lost power for the battery change. We spend five minutes trying to find the volume settings in the handset while she keeps interrupting to touch the phone and repeat that the battery is bad. We keep explaining that we wouldn't be able to turn it on if the battery was bad.

She asks if she can return the battery. I explain that batteries generally aren't returnable once open because any use renders them unable to be resold. I ask if she has the receipt. She says no. I explain that we can't even take it as defective without the receipt or the card it was purchased on. She tells Wall.e that she bought the battery in August (WHICH WAS NINE MONTHS AGO) and that this battery is the reason her phone is too quiet. She only just now decided it was unusable and needs to return it. I inform her that there is NO WAY we'll take back a nine month old battery.

She asks if she can just put the old battery back in. Wall.e and I look confused, for sure, now. Wall.e asks if the old battery works and she answers that it does. Wall.e continues to ask-- because at this point I'm already rendered speechless-- why she changed the battery in the first place. Her reply: "Because the phone was too quiet."

At this point Wall.e walks away. I assume he is speechless with rage.