Now this is a scary story (use BugMeNot to get a login and password to read the article) about shopping at Best Buy! This guy Mike Bolesta was screwed over by Best Buy for some charges ($114 to be exact) and was threatened over the phone to come and pay the bill. Being a good and comic guy, he comes into the Best Buy with 57 crisp $2 bills to pay the bill -- a subtle protest against a big box shop that threatened him. He did nothing wrong and guess where it got him: "[I]n front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons."
"I'm just here to pay the bill," Bolesta says he told a cashier. "She looked at the $2 bills and told me, 'I don't have to take these if I don't want to.' I said, 'If you don't, I'm leaving. I've tried to pay my bill twice. You don't want these bills, you can sue me.' So she took the money. Like she's doing me a favor." He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, "Are these real?"The Best Buy manager would not comment, but according to the police report "suspicions were roused when an employee noticed some smearing of ink. So the cops were called in. One officer noticed the bills ran in sequential order." Are these people serious? Mike was eventually let go (after a three hour stay cuffed to a pole at a police station) when Secret Service agents deemed the money to be real. The best part of the story is: For Baltimore County police, said spokesman Bill Toohey, "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world." So kids, remember: Use a $2 bill and you have helped Al Qaeda -- well, at least according to the Baltimore County police department.