Out of Options

When I worked as a life coach in an ex-offender re-entry program, I took a client who was newly released from prison to Walmart. She’d moved into a room in a half-way house and needed everything from soap and toothpaste to food and clothes, and the program allocated money for each client to get necessities.

I had to pick up a few things for myself so while she perused the cereal aisle, I headed off to find my shampoo and floss picks. When I returned, I found her in the same place – standing in front of a variety of Chex boxes, frozen. She hadn’t moved in the ten minutes I’d been gone.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She took a few seconds to respond. “I don’t know what to get,” she answered in a quiet tone. “There are too many choices.”

She’d been locked up for seven years in a place where the only decision was corn flakes or Cheerios. Presented with a literal wall of cereal, she was completely overwhelmed by the options.

This memory popped into my head recently when the screen on my mother’s Galaxy got cracked. After discussing it, she decided to get a Trac phone while she explored her options so she didn’t make a very expensive decision with her back against the wall. Logical. Practical.

Or so we thought.

We headed off to Best Buy, a half hour away, with hopes high, proud of ourselves for devising such a fabulous strategy. After speaking with one of the employees at the mobile counter, she settled on a lower-end Samsung phone with Verizon pay-as-you-go service. The young man couldn’t have been more helpful, and we left feeling relieved.

A half hour later, while my mom was in Costco, I tried to apply the code from the Verizon service card to her phone so she’d actually be able to use it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work. I called Best Buy, but you cannot talk to someone in the store any longer, so I was forced to deal with someone sitting in a cube halfway across the world with a script in front of her from which she was not willing to deviate.

The only answer was to return to the store. Now a forty-minute drive away.

I dropped my mom off at an appointment and headed back to the scene of the crime. To their credit, they figured it out and gave me a $25 gift card for the inconvenience. Two hours later, my mom had a working phone. You’d think that would be the end of the story.

Silly rabbit.

There was the standard learning curve, which can be frustrating. Add to that we were told when the new phone was purchased that because the screen was cracked on the original phone there was no way to transfer the data from it to the new phone.

Complicating matters further was a missing Google password. Because the number Google wanted to text the password reset link to the broken phone, which she couldn’t access, it took three days before they would let her reset it using a recognized device. This meant no Gmail on the phone and no way to use the Google Play Store to download all the apps she used. In addition, she had no one’s phone number.

We finally got everything situated, and although the phone wasn’t her favorite – there were glitches and plenty of things that were different from the Galaxy, we both still agreed it had been a better option than rushing into a thousand-dollar decision.

A couple of weeks later, the new phone wouldn’t charge.

Back we go to Best Buy on New Years Eve to find out there is a bent prong in the charger port. We’re told a new phone is the only answer. Again, Best Buy came through, not charging for the new phone even though their return policy on devices that require activation was a couple of days. They even transferred the data from the first temporary phone to the new one without charging and off we go with the new phone to a lovely holiday dinner at Outback.

The apps were working, the contacts were there but we neglected to make a call and, you guessed it, when she got home and tried to place one, nada.

Our fourth trip to Best Buy on New Year’s Day was the most interesting. It took the employee helping us over two hours to discover that you cannot just transfer a SIM card to a new pay-as-you-go phone without notifying the provider. Verizon needed to perform machinations on their end to activate the new phone. The delightful young man who’d helped us the previous evening evidently did not know this.

We also learned that Verizon customer service lived right next door to Best Buy’s, halfway around the world with the same script. They also insisted they wanted to help when the goal was actually to stick to the script. Despite the fact that Verizon said multiple times on the call with the Best Buy employee that she could keep the number assigned to the first temporary phone, it turns out she couldn’t.

So, after spending a couple of days in December notifying doctor’s offices, friends, family, neighbors, etc. of her new temporary number… she had to do it all over again.

After doing some research on models to replace the phone with the cracked screen, my mom decided she just wanted to fix the screen, almost $300 but still less than it would be to replace it, and other than the screen, the phone was fine. So back we go to Best Buy for an appointment with the Geek Squad.

Turns out Samsung no longer makes screens for that model Galaxy. When I made the appointment online, I had to input all the pertinent information – what part was broken along with the brand and model number of the phone – and they still let me make the appointment.

Nearly three hours later, because of the impressive staff at Best Buy, she left with all of the data transferred from the original phone onto the second temporary phone – something we were told was not possible on our first visit. And we learned some interesting things about possible replacements for the Galaxy.

All of that took sixteen hours. Sixteen HOURS.

Why?

Because there are too many options. It’s impossible to expect every employee at a store like Best Buy, or even a customer service rep on the other side of the world, to know the ins and outs of every single item they carry or service. We are so spoiled having dozens of choices for everything we need from cereal to cell phones that we don’t see that these options don’t make our lives easier, in fact they complicate things in epic ways.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old lady,

you don’t need dozens of options for your cereal bowl. I did just fine with Cheerios, Cap’n Crunch and a few others. You don’t need a hundred choices of cell phone. Or soda. Or body wash. But it’s all about the Benjamins in a society where capitalism is a pillar.

Manufacture/Consume/Repeat.

But at what cost? Time. Energy. Lost opportunity. Not to mention stress, which leads to a dysregulated nervous system that catapults us into fight/flight/freeze and opens the door for short tempers. And we all know what results from that – road rage, unnecessary arguments, hurt feelings. The impact is exponential on both the seller and the purchaser.

The lesson for me is, stop buying into “more is better.”

Be satisfied with a few choices.

Trust you’ll find what you need without hours of research.

Let what you find be good enough.

Fewer options. Less stress.

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