Considering the foot traffic that most Apple retail stores see, the chances that some employees have some extravagant stories are probably pretty high.

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Thanks to Thrillist, we can get a peek at just some of those stories, thanks to a range of ex-employees the publication was able to speak to. There’s quite a bit of hilarity in the full article, especially when it comes to seeing pictures on customers’ devices, or hearing the stories some customers come up with when trying to explain how their device was broken, or suffered from sudden water damage.

One of the interesting takeaways, though, is how some loopholes can be used to get a free, brand new replacement device — even if your phone is physically broken, like with a cracked screen:

“There were a few instances where you could get away with something because of how you presented it. For example, the iPhone 6 had an issue where the camera had a film that would slowly slide over the lens. When I say slowly, I mean very slowly, but eventually it would start to make a weird distortion on your pics. Say you had a cracked phone. If you take the phone in and say ‘I dropped my phone and it is cracked,’ now you need to pay the replacement fee. If you bring a cracked phone in but say ‘I read up and know this film is a defect of the phone and I’m starting to see it slip over.’ Well, now we aren’t replacing the phone for the cracked screen, are we? We are replacing it because of a known issue. So I guess it is always worth looking up issues like this ahead of time to see if you can jump through a loophole.”

Some customers have some pretty extravagant stories, which isn’t all that surprising, especially when dealing with pieces of technology that cost hundreds of dollars. For instance, one employee talks about how they had one customer that probably dropped their phone in some water, and tried to dry it in a microwave. The customer, though, had another version of that situation:

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“The most full-of-**** customer I ever had was a guy that came in and put a mutated, deformed iPhone in front of me and said ‘My phone isn’t working.’ I politely asked what happened. He explained that he had been talking on it, when suddenly the phone got very hot and started to burn his hand, so he threw it on the counter and it erupted into flames. I took the phone into the Genius Room to open it up… it clearly had been subjected to some type of liquid, and I returned to the Genius Bar to tell him. He responds with ‘Well yeah, it caught on fire, so I threw it in the sink and ran water over it.’ Right… I am quite certain that he dropped his phone in water and thought that the best idea was to dry it in the microwave.”

One of the funniest stories involves aliens, though, which is probably one of the best things ever:

“I had a guy try to convince me that the liquid damage was some kind of E.T. fluid from when he was abducted [by aliens]. It was hard to keep a straight face during that.”

The full article is certainly worth checking out, especially for a light Monday reading.

Have you ever had an interesting experience at an Apple retail store?

[via Thrillist]