I worked in a cell phone store in the days before smartphones.

Customer: “I want to transfer the information from my old phone to my new one.”

Me: “I can help you with that. Is that phone the old one or the new one?”

Customer: “The new one. The old one fell off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

I pause and process.

Me: “Sir, I would need the old phone to be able to do that for you.”

Customer: “But I heard phones connect to the internet now! Can’t you… just, aim a satellite and transfer the data?”

Me: “No, sir, it doesn’t work like that.”

Customer: “What if I remembered exactly where I was on the bridge when I dropped it?”

Me: “Sir… you’re not understanding what the barrier is here.”

Over two decades later, and now we have cloud computing, but I hope it doesn’t give that customer an excuse to be losing phones off bridges.

I worked at a cell phone provider. I worked in the call center and took calls from individual customers, as well as employees of companies who would purchase our phones in bulk. This caller is the latter.

Caller: *Angry.* “My work phone has no screen and no buttons! How the h*** are you expecting me to make calls on this thing?!”

Me: “No screen and no buttons? That’s odd. Can you read the make and model from the box it came in?”

Caller: *Shouts the model number.*

Me: “Sir, that’s a flip phone.”

Caller: “What the h*** is a flip phone?!”

This is still relatively early in the days of cell phones, so I’m guessing he’d never seen one before.

Me: “It’s a phone that… uh… flips open?”

Caller: “You’re not making any sense!”

Me: “Okay, sir, put your finger in the crack at the bottom of the phone and… push up.”

There’s a pause, a gasp, a cuss, and a click.

I’m selling a guy a phone at the wireless carrier where I used to work. I spent an hour getting all his information transferred and setting up his new phone. He does not buy any kind of warranty for it.

He comes in the next day with a shattered screen.

Customer: “You need to replace this!”

Me: “Sir, you don’t have a warranty. After the phone leaves the store, it’s your responsibility.”

Customer: “This is how it looked when I left the store!”

Me: “Sir, I was the one who sold you your phone. It did not leave the store like that.”

The customer is about to rant again, but stops and looks at me. The realization that I was the same guy from yesterday hits him.

Me: “Sir, even if you got a different person today, how could you possibly have expected this to work? Why would you leave the store with a shattered phone?”

He did not get his replacement.

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual content.

I’m a customer at a phone shop’s helpdesk. The guy at the desk is helping me troubleshoot my phone, and I see a sign on the wall behind him.

Sign: “We will not troubleshoot phones that have explicit/inappropriate wallpapers.”

Me: “How often does that happen for there to be a sign?”

Employee: *Thousand-yard stare.* “Too many.”

Me: “Ouch.”

Employee: “Last week, I had a couple who handed me an iPad. The wallpaper was the two of them… going at it… from all the angles.”

Me: “Oh my God!”

Employee: “Yeah, I told them to change it, and I pointed to the sign. They told me it doesn’t count as inappropriate as it’s them, not a p*rn star.”

Me: “As if that makes a difference.”

Employee: “Right? But then they told me the reason they were here was that they didn’t know how to change their wallpaper, so I told them they were f***ed… even more so than they were in the wallpaper.”

I laughed and commiserated with him, and was thankful that my wallpaper was a cute picture of my sleeping cat…

I’m looking at a customer’s broken phone.

Me: “Did the phone come into contact with water or any other liquids?”

Customer: “Does toilet water count?”

Me: “…”

And this is why we wear gloves to work…