Weekend in Vallejo

My cousin and his wife and kids are moving to Washington soon, so this past weekend we headed to Vallejo to attend the goodbye party. It was a nice party held at my aunt's house with some delicious lasagna that's making me hungry just thinking about it.

On Sunday my dad and I went to Fry's in Concord to buy a floor model receiver for a friend of mine. It was already ordered and I had all the information so I was just going to pop in, pay for it, and then be on our way. But I'm sure you can guess that didn't end up happening otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it.

We got to one of the many, many checkout registers Fry's has, and our checkout guy was a friendly fellow named Tye. I handed him the paper with the order information and he went to grab the receiver but came back shortly saying that it wasn't there. At first he thought the reason was because the order was only supposed to be held for 48 hours, but the email said that I should have been held until Monday. I gave him contact info so I could look up the email himself and he verified that it was supposed to be held until the 2nd. He went and looked again but couldn't find it, so he took us to the electronics department in back. He had us wait there for Chris, who was head of the department and could authorize substitutions, while he went to check the warehouse.

Chris was helping some other customers, so a couple other guys in the department tried to see if they could help, but they had no better luck and agreed that we just needed to wait for Chris. While waiting, Tye came back to say it wasn't in the warehouse either. After explaining everything to Chris, he also went off looking for it and came back empty handed. Since nobody could figure out where it was, he had us look at other models that we could possibly substitute. Mellisa, who seemed to be a higher up manager, authorized a substitution of a more expensive higher model.

I called my friend to see if that would be okay and he was happy with that, so Chris unhooked that floor model and then went to find the remote. After waiting for probably another 20 minutes he came back with just a shopping cart because he couldn't find the remote But he put the receiver in a shopping card and said we could take it up to Melissa and he would bring the remote up.

We went to the front but didn't see Melissa anywhere, so I got in line and checked out with Tye, telling him that we were supposed to bring it to Melissa. He went to find her but apparently she was on break so he had to find someone else to authorize the substitution. Eventually he got it rung up, and we headed toward the door, but Chris still hadn't shown up so my dad waited with the receiver while I went back to find Christ. He said he brought it up but didn't see us and so just put it on the podium. I headed back to the front, grabbed the remove off the podium, and exited the store.

What should have been a maximum five minute in-and-out turned out to be more like an hour and a half. But everyone was nice appeared eager to help so while it was a little frustrating it wasn't a bad experience. I would like to thank everyone in the store who worked hard to help us out.