She kept buying batteries instead of charging her phone

Back in 2006, when many handsets still had removable batteries, a supermarket mobile support worker got an unusually angry call. A customer said she had bought her first mobile phone, used it for two weeks, and now wanted to return it because it was “faulty.”

As Steve, the support worker, told The Register’s On Call column, the customer insisted the phone should “last for years” but she had already bought a third battery to keep it working.

The problem turned out not to be the handset at all. Each time the phone battery ran flat, the customer threw it away and bought a replacement, assuming it was a disposable battery like those used in other devices.

Steve asked whether she was using the charger that came with the phone. She did not realize the charger was included, and hadn’t been using it.

He then told her to fetch the original box and look inside. There, under a layer of cardboard, she found the charger.

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According to Steve, the customer “quickly climbed down” once she discovered it — a tidy fix for a support case caused less by faulty hardware than by a basic misunderstanding of how early mobile phones worked.