BOGDAN

The cell phones I get at Walmart don't last long but getting them replaced is always a treat.  Another one gave out on me last week so I drove over to visit Bogdan, the phone guy at the Walmart in Simi Valley.  He works in the electronics department from 11 am to 7 pm and is a dead ringer for the Romanian-born poet Andrei Codrescu.  His English is perfectly fine but it's delivered with that truncated baltic meter that omits nonessential words and puts some of the remaining words in surprising places.  

When I showed up and found him busy with a customer, although there were other people working there, I waited until he was freed up.  When he finished with the other customer, I walked up to him, handed him the phone and said, "It won't hold a charge."

Bogdan calmly looked it over, pressed a few buttons and then handed it back to me.

He asked, "How long have you had phone?"

I said, "A year......maybe less."

He said, "Probably battery."

I asked, "Can it be fixed?"

He said, "Fix it?  Fix it?  You are in America my friend.  Here we fix nothing, we sell, only sell.  Let me ask, you're here in this country how long?"

I said, "True, I should know better."

He stretched out a flared-open hand - a gesture I took to mean "lemme look at that again."

Bogdan once again examined the phone slowly turning it over in his hands, "There's no way to open......they make so can't be fixed, even if you wanted."  

I said, "So I'll just buy another one."

He said, "Sure, you want same shit phone?"

I said, "What are my options?"

Bogdan strode back to a locked cabinet, pulled out something, then returned and placed two small identical boxes down on the counter in front of me.  He pointed to one of the boxes and said, "Fifty."  He pointed to the second and said, "Seventy."

Even the fifty was quite a bit more than I paid last time, proving not even Walmart is immune to inflation.

Bogdan looked down at the boxes on the counter, reached toward one of them and started tapping on a corner of the seventy box with his index finger.  It was here that the Tracfone people had found it necessary to print the words: NOW YOU'RE IN CONTROL

Bogdan said, "HA! See what says here.  You have now control!  All this time you not have control, you thought maybe you did, but NO!  Not til now.  This my friend is what serious technology can do for you."

I opted for the fifty box, figuring it will quit on me before the seventy and I'll get to see Bogdan again all that sooner.