Okay, my first consumer rant. I’m all aquiver with excitement. But first, a little background.
For the past month or so, we’ve had a houseguest staying with us: Shannon’s a New Zealand college student who’s just graduated and is taking a semester off to bum around California before going back for her Masters. I feel a bit sorry for her being stuck out here in the 'burbs with no car. I mean, Marin County is a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit here. Must be dead boring for her; she’s already gone through the better part of my fairly impressive DVD collection, and has now started in on the comic books.
Anyway, the other day, she finds out that there’s a sale on cell phones at the local Good Guys. Since electronics are already cheaper here than in New Zealand, she decides to get one on a limited, cheapo plan and then upgrade when she gets back home. Problem: they won’t sell her a phone without a Social Security Number. My initial response to this was, naturally, slack-jawed befuddlement. What the hell do they need a SSN for? She’s from New Zealand. She’s going back in three months. In forty years, is she going to get a check from the US government for ten bucks? And what does that have to do with phones, at any rate? (Incidentally, Shannon had already applied for a Social Security number, which is another rant altogether. Suffice to say, she has not received it.) At any rate, she asks me to go with her and use my SSN and name on the application.
Here’s where the rant part starts. First, we have the mandatory Twenty Minute Wait before anyone can helps us. Finally, we get Ike, The Brooding Hispanic. Ike has apparently been reading Antonio Banderas’ Guide to Success for People Without Talent. At least, he keeps giving us the Antonio Banderas “look,” which is the one where he inclines his head towards you so he can gaze passionately up through his lowered eyelashes. Which probably works really well when you look like Antonio Banderas and you’re looking at Julianne Moore. It doesn’t work nearly as well when you look like Ike and are looking at a dude who could pass as Chewbacca’s understudy.
Ike gives us a form to fill out that is only slightly more complicated than my W-2. It also wants my Driver’s Liscence number and a credit card number. Okay, two problems:
First problem: Shannon is buying the phone with cash, and plans to pay her bills by check. Ike assures us that this is a formality, so that if Shannon breaks her contract, they can put a lien on her home, car, and first-born male child. Nothing to worry about there! At any rate, it’s going to be on Shannon’s card, so if she’s not going to worry about it, I’m not either.
Second problem: I don’t drive. As a result, I don’t have a driver’s liscense. I do have a California ID, which looks an awful lot like a driver’s liscense and functions as such in all situations not involving an automobile. Except that mine expired two years ago. Well, what the hell. I put my number and expiration date down on the form and hand it over to Ike. Ike asks for the ID itself, so he can FAX a copy of it to the cell company. Again, I make with the slack-jawed befuddlement, but I give him the ID card.
At this point, I’ve become extremely nervous about the level of bearaucracy we’ve already encountered over what I has assumed would be a simple business transaction. I half expected Ike to ask for a blood test and a semen sample next, but am instead relieved to learn that he’s got all the info he needs. He gives me my ID back, and goes to call the Cingular HQ and get the phone activated. This is when we find out that there is one more problem.
Third problem: The people who work at Cingular are but human-shaped husks, animated by gibbering, malevolent spirits from the inky depths of Hell.
Ike is on the phone. Shannon and I stand around and look at the cell phone display. Ike is still on the phone. We compare the various brands. We mock the uglier ones. Ike is still on the phone. We talk about how we’d like to buy the expensive ones if we weren’t poor (former, in my case) college students. We are extremely bored. Finally, Ike hangs up the phone and comes over to us. At last, Shannon can get her phone! We are such fools: Ike tells us that he is waiting for Cingular to call him back. It will take, he assures us, only a few minutes. He than bursts into diabolic laughter and vanishes in a puff of brimstone.
We wait longer. I fiddle with a wrist watch with built in GPS locator and somehow set off a store alarm. Shannon and I nonchalantly wander over to the televisions. Since we have no intention of buying a television set, we have to beat the helpful employees off with sticks. Meanwhile, there’s a man who looks like the Monopoly guy standing one aisle over holding a bulging bag with a “$” on it, looking forlornly for a sales associate to come over and sell him an entertainment center. Ike is nowhere to be seen.
We watch Tomorrow Never Dies on a fifty inch plasma screen that retails for $12,000 and simultaneously realize what fools we were for majoring in English Lit. and Philosophy, respectivly. I see Ike walking briskly towards me, and muscle my way through the throng of helpful TV salesmen to talk to him. Before I can open my mouth, he breezes directly past me, tossing a “They still haven’t called back yet!” over his shoulder. I watch him help another customer, who succesfully makes a purchase and leaves the store in less time than it took us to get Ike’s attention in the first place. I’m fairly certain Ike was mocking me when he did that.
It’s now been an hour. Tomorrow Never Dies is almost over. My feet hurt, Shannon is barely conscious from hunger, I’m going to club the next sales jerk who asks if there’s anything he can do to help me, and Mr. Monopoly is offering to pay a clerk $2,000 just to make eye-contact. Still no phone call. Ike is out front selling tickets to see the “Incredibly Naive Electronics Consumers.”
Finally, just when I’ve reached the full-on, Lord of the Flies, pig’s head on a stick stage of social breakdown, Ike comes back.
“Cingular has called back,” he says. I don’t reply, too afraid that I’m dreaming and might at any moment wake up slumped over the floor-model Bose subwoofer. Still, I feel a surge of hope. “They want me to FAX them a copy of your Social Security card.” At which point I tear his arms out of their sockets and use them to beat him to death. Well, what would you do in that situation?
Okay, that was a little bit of hyperbole. What I actually did was howl in anguished frustration and pound my forehead through the nearest picture tube. Shannon explains that we didn’t bring that with us, but we can run home and get it.
“That’s great,” says Ike, with a smile. “I’ll be here until six!”
I lunge for his throat with my teeth while making animal-like grunting noises, but Shannon gets a hold of the back of my shirt-collar and hauls me out of there before I can drink of his precious heart-fluids.
Upon returning home, I am vastly relieved to find that I don’t have my Social Security card. I have an evelope neatly labeled “Miller’s Social Security Card,” which contains a 3x5 card with my social security written on it in pencil, and a tab of paper that says:
YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CARD
Detach the card below and sign it in ink immediatly
Do not laminate your card
Carry it in your purse or wallet
Now, there could possibly be some serious repurcussions down the road for not having a SS card. But in the immediate future, it means that I don’t have to go back to purgatory of The Good Guys customer service. I do find my Selective Service registration card, which I think I was supposed to mail to somebody about nine years ago. But the important thing is, it has my name and SSN on it, and was issued by the fed’ral gubmint. Because I’m hiding under the dining room table trying to reacquire my language skills, Shannon calls the store to see if this will work in lieu of an actual Social Security Card. She talks to Ike, who promises to call Cingular and ask if that’s acceptable. He promises he’ll “Get right back to us.”
It’s now been three days, without a peep from Ike or anyone at The Good Guys. I harbor fond fantasies of Ike’s denuded, cobwebbed skeleton, sitting in some corner of the Good Guys with a phone clutched in one hand, while Cingular’s holiday hold music echoes merrily in his dusty skull. However, I rather doubt that’s the case. In fact, I don’t think that there is any such company as Cingular, and the entire store was just a front for Ike’s complex credit card scam and ID theft operation. Right now he’s probably sitting at home, ruining my credit rating by buying countless copies of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to being a Latin Heart-throb. Well, whatever. As long as it means I don’t have to go back to the store, he can buy whatever the hell he wants.
