please hold

I’ve been trying to call Best Buy to see if they have Grand Theft Auto Vice City back in stock. Word on the street is that the Duluth store alone sold 200 copies in the first week after the game’s release. I hate Best Buy for reasons that are numerous enough to jusify separate paragraphs for each.

When I applied for a job with Best Buy I got turned down… by a computer. I wrote about this before. I think it ran in the Statesman. I don’t remember. I don’t care. What matters is that they’re heartless jerks that can take their employees and shove it. Which brings us to…

Best Buy hires idiots. Idiots with pimples. Pushy idiots with pimples that try to get you to buy a replacement plan for your new toaster. I carry a pair of pliers around with me just in case one of these kids gets in my face. There’s a reason their voices still crack. I mean, I don’t stress out over gross incompetence in the retail world (if I did I would need to throw my belt over a rafter immediately), but please. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, admit it. Trust me, I know when you’re bullshitting. I haven’t survived four years in college by wit alone.

They have a name like ‘Best Buy’. What kind of boring, uncreative trash is that? No one has any fun naming their companies these days, and as a word-monger it fills my soul with pints of distilled hate. If I have a company I’m gonna name it Plastic and Steel Gewgaw Center, or Ezekiel’s Bucolic Zany Buy Things Place, or Lucky Land of Shoes and Beguiling Verbiage, or Stupid Crap to Placate the Masses, or Uncle Dane’s Global Oppression Concern.

Maybe I’ll just name it Corporation.

Anyway. I’ve tried to call Best Buy a number of times in the past, and I see a definite pattern in how the telephone system is hooked up over there. When you call the listed Best Buy phone number you end up at their Installation Center. You tell the poor soul there to direct your call to Media or Computers or Cat Torture or something, and he hits a button and the music starts. Loss Prevention picks up, so you tell Loss Prevention, now, to redirect you to Media.

You wait and listen to the music for a long time. It is intoxicating. Soon enough, Loss Prevention picks up. You utter a few syllables and the fellow remembers this stuttering idiot from before. He asks if you are still holding for Media and you say yes. He is kind and redirects you again. The phone rings a few times and an annoyed someone at Media picks up the phone and hangs it up again. His action pulls you out of the infinite swirling eddy between Loss Prevention and the store at large, and throws your flopping body to shore. Your signal dries out and goes dead.

You call back again and run the same gambit.

You call back again and finally reach a soft-speaking mademoiselle that makes your head spin all the hate melt away. No, they don’t have Vice City yet, but now it’s really not all that important.