My (34F) partner (35M) has been talking about wanting a Steam Deck for years, he couldn’t commit to it financially since we were saving up for a house in order to get on the property ladder. Well, we’ve been in our first home for a year now, so when he started talking about the Steam Deck again I encouraged him to get one, and so he did.
I was off work today so said I’d wait in for it to arrive. Now I’ve heard \*\*A LOT\*\* of stories about people’s Steam Decks being stolen by delivery people. Either it being marked as delivered and then never materialising, or an Amazon driver texting the recipient saying that they need the code, buyer innocently gives it to them, and then the driver drives off into the sun with their new Steam Deck.
I’ve also heard that Steam are absolutely fucking useless when it comes to these cases, will try and say it’s a police matter, and then will ban your account if you then try to do a chargeback. I’ve also had two instances where an Amazon delivery driver stole a Kindle, and somebody in the Yodel network stole the contents of an order, so I’m always on high alert for this kind of stuff these days.
Because of this, I thought the obvious thing to do, would be to open up the box and record myself doing it. After I opened it up, I flipped the Steam Deck around and noticed there were a bunch of fingerprints on the back that weren’t mine. I thought "\*wtf, is this a refurb?\*" , quickly powered it on, it loaded into the setup menu, and I then immediately powered it off again, satisfied that it was okay. I then boxed it back up again ready for him to get home. Filmed the entire process on my phone. Box was exactly the same as when it arrived apart from the packaging tape on the outside being removed.
Well, my partner comes home, I happily told him that I checked it over as soon as I got it, and he’s pissed. He’s pissed that I opened it before he had a chance to do it himself. I tell him that, because I wanted to make sure it was a Steam Deck inside and not a tablet from 2013. He’s mad, why didn’t I just text him to check that it was okay? Well he was in the middle of work and I knew he wouldn’t be checking his phone (case in point, he didn’t reply to my messages for 5 hours that day). Well then, why didn’t I just wait for him to reply? I tell him I wanted to do it immediately after receiving it so that the video had a timestamp set to shortly after the delivery timestamp so I couldn’t be accused of tampering with the package. He told me that I was rude and then said that what I did was autistic, at which point I started crying.
Now I’m upstairs in the bedroom crying, and he’s downstairs and hasn’t even opened the Steam Deck. He said that he was working hard all day looking forward to coming home to opening it, and that I ruined it.
Was I in the wrong here? I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing 🙁