An SAT prep book had the following question: When my uncle has gone to buy a computer, the salesman told him that he couldn't get a discount. The answer is replace "has gone" with "was" for tense consistency. Instead, he replaced it with "had gone". When I told him the answer, he told me that the pluscuamperfect "had gone" is used to denote an event in the past that occurred prior to another event in the relatively more recent past. The uncle went to the store before he talked to the salesman, so by that definition, shouldn't the first verb be the pluscuamperfect (had gone) instead of the simple preterite (went)?
Can anyone think of a rational way to predict this usage? Thanks in advance for your thoughts, because as I mentioned, I'm stumped.
