Usually, if you take your phone to be repaired, you want it back as fast as possible.

But what happens when someone leaves their device at a repair shop for over a month? Well, they need to decide how to proceed.

In today’s story, someone who works at a repair shop shares that they decided to liquidate a customer’s phone, but she returned and asked for it.

Let’s see what happened.

Where’s my Phone?

I work at a locally owned phone repair shop that does repairs anywhere from a screen to water-damaged fixes.

In our Terms of Service, which we require all customers to sign before working on their device, we state that any device left for more than 30 days is eligible to be liquidated.

This means we either sell the device or get rid of it. I’ll bet you can see where this is going.

So about a week ago, we get a call from a lady asking about her phone. We ask for her name in order to find the device.

After looking through the in-store repairs, we don’t see an order with her name on it, and ask when she brought it in.

It had been a while.

She says she left it with us on April 2nd.

I then go through the paperwork for April, and find her information.

On the top of the paper, it was written that we had attempted to call her twice in April, twice in May, and then one more time in June.

All 5 times, we had left a voicemail explaining what needed to be repaired, how much it cost, and our phone number to get back to us.

I then ask her if I can place her on hold while I talk to the manager, she says okay.

After talking to the manager, we came to the conclusion that the phone has obviously been liquidated at this point, as it is well past the 30-day limit we have.

She was surprised.

We’re often very lenient with the 30-day limit, and we understand that people are busy.

But it’s been 5 MONTHS since she dropped her phone off for repair, and we have certainly gotten rid of it.

I return to the call to tell her the unfortunate news, and she doesn’t take it well.

I explain how we had tried to contact her 5 times before finally liquidating it, and had instead waited 3 months instead of our 30-day limit.

I’m then told that she was out of the country on vacation for 4 months, and didn’t have access to the contact phone SHE LEFT US in order to get in touch if we needed to.

Things reach a boiling point.

She goes off on me, saying that there are business contacts and information on that device, and she NEEDS it.

I reiterate that there is nothing more that can be done, as the device has been liquidated and she had signed the Terms of Service.

She then tells me that she will be filing a police report. She demands to speak to a manager, and I hand the phone off.

Manager reiterates everything I’ve already told her, that she signed the Terms of Service, left it with us for 5 months, and it’s been liquidated.

Lady gets even angrier and hangs up on the manager.

The manager then gives our owner a heads-up call, letting him know that we may have a difficult customer on our hands for the next few days.

I’m honestly shocked that she would leave a repair with us, and then leave the country for 4 months.

She should worry less about where’s her phone and more about where’s her mind.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this.

Asking the real questions.

We all worry.

Probably.

Someone has a different theory.

Someone shares an idea.

Phone repair shops are not storage services, lady!

But they can be… For a price.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.