My goodness, when was this? I worked there for a short stint in 2000, right around the launch of the PlayStation 2(which was an utter nightmare in of itself). I probably would've flipped if I had been subjected to that.
It was sometime around 2005 to 2008. You could always take the earpiece off if you were in the middle of a deep conversation with a customer, and it was handy to be able to call a manager or another department without having to chase them down somewhere in the store.
I was in Geek Squad, so if I was always either talking to a customer or fixing computers.
Also like everything else at Best Buy, your experience varied dramatically depending on your managers. At my store, managers expected you to be available over the radio, customer or not.
You could get away with taking it off very occasionally, but that was it.
