Buying a new Mobile Phone- Strike 1

After a long and frustrating battle with a mobile phone which I suspect is possessed by a drunken demon, I decided to purchase a new one. I went down to my local Vodafone store where I was greeted by a young and quite spunky sales assistant with a make-up job I have not experienced since my days of hanging out at various drag-show clubs in Florida.

She was quite polite, although I struggled to understand her due to her very recent second(!) tongue piercing which she proudly showed me. When all the ‘formalities’ were concluded she suggested that we should move on to the real reason I was there, to purchase a new phone.

So the first and very obvious question from an up-and-coming mobile phone sales expert was “what kind of phone you want and what do you want it to do?” I was quite startled by the “what do you want it to do” part of the question, and as a person with a deep appreciation for sarcasm and smartarse remarks, I could instantly feel the sensation of a million possible replies surfing on my now giant brain waves- it was just a bit too easy though.

So I simply told her that I was interested in a phone I could make phone calls on. Silence. I can’t remember the last time I’ve received such an empty stare and I could quite clearly see how the silence was making her uneasy, but really, as far as I was concerned it was her turn to speak.

She finally composed herself, fixed one of her fake eye-lashes and pointed to a new Nokia. “This one has a 5 megapixel camera, bluetooth, mp3 and mp4 player, TV and FM tuner, a GPS and 18 pre-installed games”. Since she hadn’t told me whether this Nokia ‘phone’ had the particular feature so important to me, I saw no other choice but to ask her whether I could make phone calls on it.

This question was obviously too much for her (perhaps she didn’t know the answer) so she asked me to leave the store and informed me as-a-matter-of-fact that “she didn’t get paid enough to deal with assholes like me”. I left.

Whether the new Nokia could make phone calls, I guess I’ll never know. I still have my old drunken demon phone.