Eleven Days
The warranty was two years. The machine had stopped on a Thursday, two years and eleven days after Freya had sold it, and the man now standing at the counter had brought the receipt in a plastic folder, the way careful people do.
He wasn't angry, which made it harder. He set the folder down, turned it round so that she could read it the right way up, and apologized for taking up her Friday.
“It's eleven days,” he said. “I know it's eleven days.”
Freya knew the policy better than she knew most things. Two years meant two years. Inside the window, a repair is paid for by the manufacturer and the shop is simply the place where the form is filled in; outside it, nobody pays for anything, and the sentence that says so takes about four seconds to say. She also knew, because she had sold nine of this model and had two of them back, that a drum bearing which fails at two years is not a machine that has worn out. And she knew what her manager would say about the difference between those two facts on Monday, when he went through the log: that it was interesting, and that it wasn't the shop's money.
If the man had called in the spring, when the noise started — and he told her, without being asked, that there had been a noise in the spring — the claim would have been opened in two minutes and none of this would have been her decision. But he hadn't called, because the noise had stopped, and because people don't call about noises that stop.
Although the rule was clear, the outcome wasn't. Even though she could have said the four-second sentence, and even though nobody in the company would have blamed her for saying it, she stood there with his folder in her hand and didn't say it.
There is a line in the system for manufacturer goodwill. It exists; she had used it twice in four years; it requires the assistant's own name in the authorization box, which is the whole point of it. She typed her name. She attached a photograph of the receipt and the service note about the bearing, and she wrote three sentences that were all true, and she sent the claim at 5:52.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
“An engineer calls you Tuesday,” she said. “Keep the folder.”
The screen went back to the home page, as though nothing at all had been decided on it. Outside, the buses were full and it had started to rain, and the man crossed the road without his umbrella up, holding the folder against his chest instead. Her manager opens the goodwill log on Monday mornings, first thing, with his coat still on. Freya turned off the lights over the display machines and went to catch her bus.