and waste the chance that I've been given...
So I used to own a Playstation 2. I bought it when they first came out, and used to play it all the time. Recently, with school, and EQ2 and just life in general I haven't played it as much. And when I say, "as much" I mean once or twice in the past 6 months.
This girl I had been stationed with in the Army recenly came back to Ft. Hood as an Apache pilot. She brought her 12 year old son with her. Shes making pretty good money, but things are still rather tight for them. They came down to Austin one day and the son was admiring my PS2 and talking about how he would like a PS2 or an XBox, but he would have to same up the money himself and that would take a while. I took his mom aside and told her how often I played my PS2 and offered to let her have it to give as an christmas present. She thought this was a great idea, but insisted she pay me something. So I got $100 for my PS2 and 30 games, a pretty fair deal in my eyes.
Because the mother is in the Army, she gets sent to the field often, and because she is an officer, she usually works long days. She gave her son a cell phone for emergencies. Sometimes, though I think he gets bored of going to the youth center, or a friends house after school and like to talk to people on the phone. The other day my phone was ringing, and when I pick up the phone, I hear a voice I don't recognize say, "Your PS2 is broken." It took me a couple seconds to figure out who this is (remember its been a month or so since he's had the PS2, and this is the first time I've heard of it). I asked him what was wrong with it, and he told me it was getting a disk read error. Now as I said I bought this PS2 when it first came out, and in the 5-6 years I've had it, I've never had this problem. I explained this to him, and suggest he needed to clean the disk. He told me he had tried that, all the while telling me that MY PS2 was broken. How am I supposed to tell a 12 year old that hes shit outta luck? The PS2 was shipped to virginia (thats where they were for xmas), and it worked fine there (according to mom), it was then taken on a plan from VA to TX and when it arrived in TX it still worked fine. Now almost a month later its not working... Hmm could it be that the PS2 is broken, or user error? I asked him which games it was doing this on, and low and behold, it was NOT any of the 30 games I had sent him. At this point I told him I was sorry, but I had no idea what could be wrong, or what he could do to fix it.
A few days later I received another phone call. When I answered the phone the first words I hear are, "Now your PS2 wont play ANY games!" On one hand I feel bad for the kid, but on the other, can I really feel responsible for this, now a month after hes had it? I suggested he buy one of those disks that are designed to clean the lens of the reader, and finally hung up. I was seriously at the point of pulling the $100 out of the bank and driving up to Ft. Hood and buying the stupid thing back from him, even if it was now broken.
Last night, his mother called to talk to my wife. My wife asked her what was wrong with the PS2, and guess what? It turns out that the dog had knocked the PS2 off the table and it fell on the hardwood floor.
Maybe next time I'll just shut my big mouth when it comes to selling to a friend.