November, 2012. Seems like it was only last year. So much has happened since then that it’s hard to remember exactly how this whole mess got started. And like a lot of cases involving a runaway cellphone, it didn’t strike anyone as such a big deal back then. Boy were they mistaken.

It all begins with a woman, a California woman. Her new phone was acting hinky.

“The phone would just shut off,” she would later tell CBS Sacramento’s Kurtis Ming, the investigator who would eventually find himself lured into this mystery.

But she had a plan; a warranty plan. So she took that phone to Best Buy to get it fixed by a Geek. You can probably guess that since I’m telling you this story that things didn’t go as planned.

A week comes and no phone. Two weeks…three, a month. Still nada. She makes repeated visits to Best Buy, but she might as well have been screaming into the wind.

“We don’t know what happened to your phone, we can’t find your paperwork, oh give us a week,” she recalls, “that gets tiresome.”

She rode this un-merry-go-round for three long months. While we all took it for granted that we could call home on Christmas with phones of our own, she was borrowing a phone just to keep a tether to the rest of the world.

Finally, she used that borrowed phone to get Ming on the case. From there, it was a whirlwind of action as Best Buy HQ got involved, not only tracking the unlucky lady’s phone down, but tossing in a $100 gift card as a way of saying, “sorry about that.”

And so this case was finally closed, but it’s hard to rest easy when you know there’s always another mystery waiting outside your door to be solved.

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