One summer day, a man entered the Berlin Kuekem store with his broken computer.
The hard drive did not give more of itself.
"Rare movies were downloaded," says the clerk without going into unnecessary details.
The store employee kept the device and sent it to the technician who collaborates with this modest business in the Arganzuela district of Madrid.
They managed to recover it and a few days later they delivered it to the client as new.
He verified that it worked, paid and went to his house to continue using the computer as he saw fit.
But that would not be the last time they would see each other.
Surely, the man downloaded harmful content to the laptop again, because the device said enough again.
So, he returned to the premises of Kuekem, a Madrid native born in Cameroon, but this time with angry complaints.
Three months had passed since the first repair.
“I told him: 'When we delivered it to you, it worked, didn't it?
You can't blame us for it having stopped working again."
Despite the bad manners, the manager agreed to re-check the device and not charge him for this second repair.
"In the end you want to win customers, so I agreed not to charge him so he could see the goodwill," he says behind the counter.
However, the person in charge of the business reminded him that if he had a complaint, he had the complaint forms at his disposal, says Kuekem, while pointing to the sign that indicates so,
Kuekem's business is one of those small places with a wide range of products and services: from sending currency to photocopies, repairing devices, selling prepaid cards... He has been behind his counter for more than a decade, He drinks coffee in the morning at the bar next door and has never had a problem with his customers.
Until she stumbled across one she'll never forget.
This Monday, around six o'clock in the afternoon, the man with the computer re-entered the establishment.
“I thought that he was finally coming for him, that he had been there in the back room for more than a month, but instead he told me: 'Come, come, I want to show you something.'
The customer started to unzip his coat and showed Berlin Kuekem a somewhat rusty hatchet.
While doing this, the enraged customer made reference to the clerk's African origins and also launched a string of insults and threats at him.
"He told me that he was going to send me back to my country, but this is my country, I pay taxes like everyone else, there is no special line at the Treasury for blacks," he recounts.
With the help of a friend who was at that moment in the store sending money to his country, they managed to make an attempt to talk to him, while they were directing him towards the exit.
In one last quick move, they threw him out into the street and closed the door.
So, Kuekem called 112 and in just a few minutes a municipal police patrol arrived at the premises.
When he saw the agents, the attacker ran to hide the ax in the surroundings, but the policemen had no trouble finding it.
The man was detained, despite the fact that he accused the person in charge of having wanted to deceive him.
Kuekem shows the complaint that he subsequently filed at a National Police station.
He keeps it in the same room at the back of the store where the man's laptop remains, which he never wanted to pick up.
🚨 A man was arrested for threatening the owner of a local with an ax in the district of #Arganzuela.
The detainee thus showed his discontent with the repair of a laptop that he had left in the establishment #SeguridadCiudadana #VelamosPorTi pic.twitter.com/UCdqWJq6SM
– Madrid Municipal Police (@policiademadrid) January 10, 2023
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