On the sheet of paper Best Buy gave me when I dropped off the camera to be repaired it says that the scheduled completion date was the 20th. So when I dropped by on the 20th and was told the 25th, I was a little bitter, but hey, only five days, and I can handle that. Fast forward to today.

I call Best Buy and ask where my camera is. I talk to Customer Service wench, Marianne, who says she’ll find someone to help me and proceeds to hang up on me, instead of putting me on hold. So I call back, tell her who I am, and she acts annoyed with me and says, “I’m getting someone, just wait a minute.” Then prances off to do who knows what without letting me tell her that she hung up on me.

About three minutes later I get to talk to some guy who has no clue about the status of my camera, only that it isn’t there. He does manage to tell me, after much clicking of his keyboard, that it was received at the Connecticut camera repair shop they hire to fix stuff for them. I start asking him about the wait time, and he says that they have a thirty day policy and it hasn’t been thirty days yet. He then gives me the number to the repair shop so I can check on it myself and he can get back to discussing Magic cards or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever it is the pimply Geek Squad people do while they take an hour in the back room to answer a simple question.

I call Connecticut and get their brand of “customer service” which is listening to a long list of non important information and then being told to leave a message without any promise of your message being acknowledged or returned. I leave my message between clenched teeth, hang up and call Best Buy back, where I ask to speak with a manager and get the same grease ball I started with.

I explain to him that this company’s reluctance to provide him or me with any information really isn’t good customer service. He goes on and on about how this can take from two to four weeks depending on back ordered parts (which they usually get informed about, but since we have no information, clearly, he hasn’t been). I ask him at what point they just replace the camera so I can get back to my life. I explain that I bought the expensive warranty so I didn’t have to be without a camera for long periods of time. It gets me no where.

Last time my film camera broke, I brought it in under warranty and it was replaced right there with no questions asked. Policy has changed in the past few years, I guess, and not for the better. I suppose with a camera they think that if they can fix it, it will save them more money to not just replace it outright, but since it takes so long the only reasonable option left to me is to, upon finding my camera in need of repair, cause it enough damage to render it obviously unrepairable, so that they replace it with more immediacy and don’t make me crazy waiting for it!

So, for now, I just sit here and stew and look at the large pile of Gymboree clothing and Leap Frog stuff I have to list on eBay, but cannot take pictures of. I keep watching my baby grow without being able to take a picture of how cute she is. And I plan my nasty letter to several different branches of Best Buy, if upon hitting the thirty day mark I am still without answers.