Further Adventures of a Phonaholic

I should have known something interesting was happening when I saw the fire truck outside.

Remember what I told you about my granddaughter’s phone dying while we were in Florida? Well she has bad luck with airlines, too. On her trip home from Dallas last year, she got bumped—for two days. This year her flight was delayed an hour, which was an improvement. And not to worry—she had my BlackBerry.

Then at about 11 p.m., I got a text from her. (Remember, hubby was able to supply a charger for her phone, so I was using it while she had mine.) “Plane running late. No response from Mom. Please make sure she knows.”

So I texted her back, which was really texting myself, since she had my phone—kind of surreal, “OK, will email her.”

When I opened my email to send the note, I found a message from my daughter, “Dropped phone one too many times. Please let Crystal know I’ll pick her up as planned.”

After I answered my daughter’s email, I texted my granddaughter to let her know that her mother ‘s phone was broken, but she would pick her up. The next day we drove up to exchange phones and to give an extra we had to my daughter so she could communicate while I checked into getting her a new one. About a week later, she came down to pick up her new BlackBerry Curve, and when we pulled into the parking lot, there sat the fire truck.

Inside the phone store, three firemen were huddled around the closed door to a back room. They were concentrating intently, mostly on the door, but also on controlling their expressions, which occasionally erupted into quickly suppressed giggles. The salesman who had sold me the phone approached us with a smirk on his face. Seems his coworker had gone into the break room to change clothes when he got off duty, and when he closed the door, it locked.

Because it was not supposed to be lockable from the inside, it was not un-lockable from the inside. But neither did the key outside the door unlock it. And because it was also the room where their inventory of phones was stored, the hinges were on the inside, and the door was reinforced with steel.

The coworker had been locked in for about 40 minutes while the firemen tried in vain to remove the lock from the door, the only way to get the door open.  In the meantime, our salesman chortled.

Other customers were asked to return later because all the stock was locked in the room with the coworker, but the phone I planned to purchase had been ordered from another location, so it sat on the salesman’s desk waiting for us.

Just as we finished our transaction, the imprisoned coworker was able to use a tiny screwdriver (one of those designed to be carried in a nerd’s pocket protector—hubby is never without his) to remove the plate of the lock on the inside. He used his phone to take a photo of the lock’s mechanism and sent it to our salesman, who showed it to the firemen. They were then able to figure out how to unlock the door and release the coworker, who was a bit surly, but not in as bad a mood as you might expect after his experience.

When we walked out with my daughter’s new phone, the firemen, still carefully controlling their expressions, were climbing into the fire truck.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011