The One About The iPhone

I am brilliant in many things, like solving puzzles, licking stamps, memorizing lyrics and making women scream – largely for the wrong reasons. I also invented many things like the relationship life cycles, post-it pads and alphabets.

Yet, my brilliance is also marred and humbled in the presence of what most have adopted into their routine mundane life of existence; technology.

You should know that I’m not a big fan of tech gadgets, even though I sometimes imagine myself to be through forced assimilation like purchasing a playstation and most recently, an iPhone. I validate this by the fact that until very recently, my iPhone was completely stock – for 4 months -, and it puzzled everyone on why I would have an iPhone if I didn’t intend to load it with applications.

And for one reason only; because I find downloading these applications a chore. Also largely because I am lazy and I don’t know how to, and I don’t really want to know how to because if I have the time to sit down and download stuff, then it better be porn, Entourage or Gossip Girl.

Obviously there are the downsides of not having games on the phone, especially when you need to pre-occupy yourself when taking a dump. The good thing is that you won’t hog the cubicle and you will be less susceptible in developing piles or cervical cancer.

The iPhone sucks – or at least mine does.

The phone keeps restarting so often that I’m sometimes convinced it is on an eco-friendly sleep mode. It hangs more frequently than inmates on death row and the damn ‘Home’ button is faulty. If you are an iPhone user, you deserve an award for patience, a plague for putting up with this crap or you deserve a hug at least.

If you aren’t one, then let me adequately emphasize of what paramount value this ‘Home’ button is. Imagine what water is to the earth, what Michael was to the Jackson’s 5, what air is to humans, what the anus is to the gay community, what pussy is Ron Jeremy. It is universal, you cannot live without it, simply because by default, that is the only button there is – that actually has a purpose.

Without that, your iPhone is about as useful as socks would be for kids with apodia or contact lenses for Stevie Wonder.

So my phone crashed for the umpteenth time today. I stopped counting long ago, because if I celebrated each time with a candle, I would have made Madame Tussaud’s look like a MacDonald’s children's birthday party. The only problem is that I could not restart it this time.

And I tried everything; holding the soft restart buttons – which is pressing the power button with the almighty universal Home button – long enough to lose an erection while on Viagra. I tried removing and replacing the SIM card. I even said a little prayer to God.

Nothing worked. And it got worse because I would get all these calls coming in but there was no way I could answer them, or switch the phone off. And I didn’t know if they could hear me on the line, because my sentences always opened with, ‘Fucking hell’ and was punctuated with pretty much every expletive you could muster.

This bothered me enough to actually make a trip down to the Singtel store. When I got there, there were two queues at the information counter. One was for general enquiries and the other was for angry iPhone owners, who like me, got fucked over by our phone.

I can’t say I’ve been totally dissatisfied with the phone because there are a few important functions that it has dutifully served me well on, like being black in colour and having a functional alarm clock.

However, a peculiar scene started unraveling before me. There were actually more people sending in their iPhones for repair than there were actually people buying it. This is like charity shows; people generally do not give a fuck where their money is going, so long as they look good doing it. This also meant that there were other morons out there like me.

So why is it, that despite all the faults, people still continue to snap up the iPhone like Vuitton on discount? That is simply because, the iPhone is the coolest gadget to have, since the Tamagotchi.

Then it came to my turn,

Me: “My phone crashed.”
Guy: “Did you do a soft reset?”
Me: “Of course I tried it. It doesn’t work.”

He proceeded to try it anyway. Surely, I had done it correctly. Surely I had put in enough conviction to try the soft reset at least a dozen times over. Surely, I couldn’t be that much of an idiot. Could I?

Then 10 seconds later, it restarted miraculously. I don’t know how he did it, but he had such a miraculous touch, even Mother Theresa would be proud to shake his hands.

He stared at me, almost a contemptuous gaze at my incompetence. I could have done a soft reset myself, but I travelled all the way to town, walked all the way to the place – under sweltering heat and impatient traffic congestions no less – just to have a guy do something even a 7 year old autistic kid on cocaine could have done?

I really outdid myself this time.

Me: “Oh, the phone keeps resetting and my Home button is spoilt.”

Naturally I wasn’t going to make myself look like an idiot. I was going to salvage all I could, even if I had to accuse the iPhone of changing colours if I must. He eventually gave me a queue number for my phone to be serviced.

Girl: “Hi Sir, good afternoon.”
He: “My Home button is spoilt and my phone keeps restarting. Sometimes I don’t get vibrations and the ring tone periodically…”
Girl: “Don’t worry sir, I will be replacing a new set for you.”

They are REPLACING me a new set just because my button is faulty? I can't imagine what they will compensate me if the phone electrocute me. What can I say.

I love the iPhone.