Friends, there will be a double posting this weekend; first, this post about the truly exquisite rash of bad luck I’ve experienced this past week, and second, a rather special pre-planned post I hope you’ll tune in Sunday for. It’s going to be incredibly personal and revealing for me, and I’m scared of it, but I think it’s something that needs to be expressed in my own personal context.

Before that, though, here’s a log of the past seven days, detailing the uniquely frustrating set of circumstances surrounding my recent purchase of a new phone, the first Really Big Purchase of my adult life, besides college and health insurance. And my work bag with unicorns on it. There were tears. There was laughter. There was definitely some dark magic at work, and some kind wizards to help combat it. Without further ado, I present: The Great Phone Purchase Debacle of 2019.

SATURDAY

• My old phone, a gift from my brother and my first smartphone, refused to keep charging (it was a known problem when the phone was given to me back in 2017, and has steadily gotten worse over the last month); I managed to get a last-minute cloud backup of all my stuff on the phone even though it was in single-digit battery power (YAY, QUALITY PRODUCT EVEN AS IT DIES).
• I couldn’t order a phone online through the Service Provider (hereon referred to as SP) website, because the third-party payment company (hereby known as 3PPC) said my info couldn’t be processed and identity couldn’t be verified, so my application was effectively denied.
• Went on a quick run to a nearby Major Retailer, which the SP operates out of; this trip yielded the advice to order online for better deals and better shipping. I went home and tried a couple more times, then pulled up the SP customer service chat.
• SP customer service said to call 3PPC customer service after several tries of trying to communicate the problem I was having; after I closed the chat and showed the log to my dad, he suggested a misunderstanding had occurred that led to the dissatisfying conclusion I came to. I decided to stick to the customer service agent’s advice and call 3PPC in the morning, since it was sound advice regardless.

SUNDAY

• First call to 3PPC suggested switching my browser to Chrome. It did not help. Second call to 3PPC suggested going into the Major Retailer, and seeing if they could help me, since there were further tools at their disposal to verify identity.
• I thought about going after church, but ultimately decided to wait until the following morning and run to several different Major Retailer locations to see if they had the phone I wanted in stock, or could even just help me order a new one.
• Played an invigorating game of DnD with my friends. It was awesome, even if I was emotionally exhausted from the phone shenanigans and the lesson I taught at church earlier.

MONDAY

• I spent two and a half hours before work running between every Major Retailer location I could think of in the tri-city area; every one had an information card for the phone I wanted, but no actual phone in stock; at this point I did not ask about ordering online because I was not wanting to be late for work.
• After work, I went to the first Major Retailer location I visited that morning, since I had not actually interacted with them (just checked if they had a card for the phone I wanted, at least; they did, but not quite the model, so I wanted to check other places). At this location, there were two guys in the electronics department, hereon known as A and J. There was also a salesman of other phones for another Major Service Provider, who was just there for the night (referred to as K).
• A is very charismatic and knowledgeable about his department, and immediately suggested I talk to K about buying a phone with one of the Major Service Providers and switch my service to them. Not quite what I was wanting, but K listened to what my actual problem was while A was busy running around helping folks, and when A got back K communicated to him my wishes. A said the best he could do as far as ordering a phone for me was to let me use one of the display laptops and buy from the SP website. I took this opportunity to show him the error message I was getting (once I could get his attention again; very attentive to his customers, there’s just a lot of them to attend to).
• At this point J came into the department, and once he and A saw the error I was getting, decided to run my order directly through their computer system, straight through SP. It took a long time to load, and then popped up with an error message neither of them had ever seen before. A and J suggested to come back Wednesday evening, when the SP representative would be there, and he would possibly be able to help sort out the problem.
• Went home very discouraged. Cried for an hour. Definitely popped some capillaries around my eyes. Went to bed early.

TUESDAY

• At this point, I was back to using my old iPod Touch 5, putting Facebook Messenger back on it and hoping nobody needed anything too urgently. First day of field trips for the daycare kids, and I put on my funky new shorts and a tank top and tried to take my mind off the issue.
• Nintendo announced new features for the upcoming Pokémon games and two new Pokémon were revealed, both of which I love. Excitement for the game refueled!

WEDNESDAY

• Apparently work tried to call me in early. I had no phone and could not respond. Arrived at normal time to take the kids on their next field trip and stepped right into a mess of a day.
• I got off early to go meet the SP representative and talk to the Major Retailer tech guys, who remembered me and my problem. SP representative, hereby called M, is also a very charismatic person and familiar with A and J, very jokey. This is important to the story.
• J immediately went on lunch when I got there, (which made this next part difficult, stay tuned); A said the phone I wanted in the exact model was in the store, and he would go get it so we could try to get the transaction done. He left to get to the storage room to get the phone. He was gone for a very long time, came back and apologized, said he was still waiting on a manager to help him out, and called one over the store intercom. Entire time, M is trying to talk me into a cheaper phone (much appreciated, but not quite what I needed or wanted) and/or a different Service Provider, in between helping out around the electronics department while A and J were both gone.
• A eventually came back with the phone and an activation kit for my SP, tried to put my order through again, and helped out a few people who had piled up in his absence while the system processed the order. The system kept continually loading and loading, never putting the order through, and we did this several times. A was not quite sure what the problem with the system was, since J was still on lunch, but he and M were doing wonders for my anxious nerves by being charming and funny (I think my face betrays everything I’m feeling, because in hindsight it feels like they were trying to keep me from crying, which was a real possibility).
• Finally J returned, and worked his quiet magic on the system to finally make it get to the point where signatures were required. It turned out that SP’s marketing is deliberately misleading about their prices and the $34 a month I thought the phone was worth (over a 24-month lease) is just for people who have literal perfect credit scores, or Excellent Payment History. I, with my very little credit (though have never missed a payment on anything before), count as having Average Payment History, and my monthly payments just for the phone came out to $93 a month (over a 15-month lease. And, I want to point out, about twenty dollars more than the Average Payment History option listed on the phone. Build your credit, kids).
• At this point, A, J, M, and I had a serious talk about pricing and options, because I was a bit floored by the difference (sixty dollars more a month than expected, about a hundred more a month than I’ve been paying for just my cell service, YIKES). I was listening about the options presented, and thought about them as carefully as I could, but being of fried brain and wobbly emotional constitution, decided I would rather pay more for phone and less for service than the other way around, and signed the lease papers for my phone. They were very pleased that we had managed to get this far in the transaction, after the many, many times we’d had to re-enter my information to try and get the order through. This was nearing the two-hour mark.
• J started helping customers while A rang me up, and the first time I swiped my card to pay, the computer screen went dim, and the order glitched out, not completing. It took J a few more minutes to find my order in the backlog and him re-entering my information yet again to get it up and running.
• My card went through the second time; then it took a while for the computer to process. Eventually turned out there was a register issue, which another Major Retailer employee had to be called in to fix, but…eventually…the order went through, and I had acquired a new phone. Finally!
• M decided to help me through the activation process, and thank heaven above he did, because there was a Whoopsie with the transaction (which had to go through the 3PPC to complete, mind you, who has been accepting and processing my service payments for almost two years now!!) where the phone was assigned a new number, which was not the desired outcome. M showed himself to be a true wizard at that point, never shouting but using a firm, calm voice on the phone with the SP customer service (which is amazing, because if there had been shouting, I would have fallen apart).
• The SP help desk caller on the other end of the line put M on hold, supposedly to transfer him to a supervisor, and after a few minutes dropped the call. M was a bit incredulous at this point, as a SP representative, and called them back. The goal was to keep service for the rest of the days I had already paid for at the beginning of the month, plus the month I paid for during the transaction to buy the phone and the plan with it, and to transfer my old number over to the new phone. This was apparently too tall an order for the supervisor M found himself on the phone with, who then transferred him to a different department. I forget how long we were bounced around, but during one of the hold periods, M looked on his computer for a quote of the day and asked me to pick one out (again, probably as a distraction from the two and a half hour process this had become).
• The quote that best fit ironically wouldn’t download, so we went with another one instead. (“When you can’t change the direction of the wind—adjust your sails” was the original, I forget what we went with because this one was too perfect.)
• We were on hold with the new lady who was supposedly gonna fix this problem so long M had to start packing up his merch table where he promoted SP, and for a moment it seemed he was about to leave me with his phone. I barely heard the instructions he was leaving for me, thanks to the immediate panic buzzing in my ears, but luckily the lady came back before he left and he stayed with me to finish the phone setup and make sure the transfer went through (which was great, because somehow I couldn’t understand a word the woman on the phone was saying; at that point we were reaching the three hour mark and I was so tired and stressed I think I was losing all comprehension of my reality).
• It took a couple of tries, but eventually the phone did the thing! It worked! I was nearly in tears as I thanked M and J for their help (A was on lunch), and asked them to tell A I said thanks as I was leaving the store, clutching the plastic bag holding my new phone and accoutrement with very shaky hands. The relief was so intense after the long stretch of stress and uncertainty, I felt like I was floating.
• I bought an orange baseball cap as my last frivolous purchase (well, almost, the story has some epilogue to it), and wore it proudly out of the store with my new phone blowing up from all the activity I’d missed in the last few days.

At this point, the story of the Great Phone Purchase Debacle of 2019 is over, but if you’d like to see the further points of bad luck this poor phone has undergone, plus a prime example of my own idiocy, read on. I promise this Epilogue isn’t as dissatisfying as others you may have read.

THURSDAY

• Unfortunately, now it was time to get a new phone case, since my old one fit dimensionally but had the wrong-sized camera cutout, and a new pop socket. Buying a new tempered glass screen protector was, of course, a foregone conclusion. I visited the Major Retailer nearest my work for a case and the screen protector, but couldn’t find a pop socket I liked, so I decided to go to a different Major Retailer, since they’d had a Pokéball design I’d had my eye on for a couple years.
• THEY DID NOT HAVE THE POKÉBALL DESIGN IN THE STORE.
• Frustrated now, I just picked a cheaper one that had a design I still liked, and left the store with that. Once I was home, I realized I had been to two different stores and had completely forgotten to buy shipping envelopes to send off an Etsy order, which is why I went to the Major Retailer near my work in the first place.
• Getting the screen protector on the phone was surprisingly an ordeal, because the glass and the plastic kit designed to help the screen go on straight were misaligned. Dad was helping me at that point, and when I finally got the screen protector on at an angle I thought was straight, he helped to get rid of an air bubble under the screen by lifting a corner to re-attach the protector. Unfortunately, this caused some sizable specks of dust to get trapped up under the screen, which I absolutely knew was going to drive me insane. After examining my handiwork, I realized that I had missed my mark just enough to be annoying—-a sliver of screen wasn’t even under the protector, and the curves around the fingerprint button were irritatingly off-center. UGH.

FRIDAY

• Dealt with the minor annoyances of the screen protector’s defects by finally buying the envelopes I needed, getting a new screen protector kit, and mailing off the Etsy order, which balanced my annoyance nicely.
• This was further balanced when an Etsy order that had mistakenly gone to the wrong address last month finally arrived back at my house, safe and sound and ready to be sent to the correct address to the very patient customer (who accepted my offer weeks ago of an alternate item from the store to make up for the loss; unfortunately the piece they originally bought was one-of-a-kind and not replaceable, but they were happy with the free exchange I offered).
• Replacing the screen protector worked like a charm. The kit was still somewhat misaligned so I had to freehand it again, but this time I hit my mark perfectly. Whole screen protected. And the dust motes that got trapped under the screen protector this time are so small I won’t even notice them most of the time.

I am hoping that this is the end of the story; this has been one of those weeks that really makes you appreciate your own resilience, or lack thereof. I am absolutely a praying woman and a woman who believes in signs, but despite all evidence to suggest that the Universe didn’t want me to have a phone at all, I felt at peace with the decision to stick to the phone I wanted and the cell service I have no complaints about. This week was a growing experience, and a milestone for my credit score and my life. The results remain to be seen, but for now, I’ll tighten my belt around my frivolities, buy fewer fun shorts and baseball caps, and thank my lucky stars that despite all the overwhelming and bizarre bad luck, I still got what I needed in the end.

Is it appropriate to take Major Retailer employees cookies?