A weekend call from Orange County routed through a Sears call center in Florida came from an 80-year-old man who made a comment about blowing up the department store at Laguna Hills mall, according to authorities.
“He thought he was getting the runaround,” an Orange County sheriff's official reportedly said–which for anyone who has been in call center runaround hell brings to mind Chris Rock's famous line about the O.J. Simpson murders, “Now, I'm not sayin' he should have killed
her . . . but I understand.”
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The Consumerist has the scoop on the local threat to aisles filled with Kenmore washers, Apostrophe dresses and Craftsman chain saws.
Cops say the unidentified geezer called to bitch about repair service he'd received. When he was transferred from one rep to another, he apparently snapped and let it slip about how much the Laguna Hills Sears store might be itchin' for a bombin'.
A search of the Laguna Hills mall produced no explosive devices other than the food court's chili dogs. Unfortunately for Gramps, such calls are easily traced, and deputies arrived at the man's front door wanting to know what was what. The old coot apparently admitted to being the caller, but deputies concluded he didn't really mean to and decided against an arrest.
That Orange County deputies resisted the urge to further crowd their jail cells is rare but not the most surprising part of this sad tale. Sears still routes calls to Florida? Not India? There's one reason to shop there.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.