I live and work among family and friends who have a variety of cellphones: Apple iPhones and Android cellphones i.e. technologically advanced handsets that seem to run on bakery items like gingerbread, ice-cream sandwich etc. The fruit family has an additional representative in our very own Blackberry boy who is a girl, but seems to be on her way up (or is it down?) the android path.
The handset conked out in just five months ...took me to the dark ages for the want of a charging pin that could not be replaced. I was told rather insensitively, "There is water in the handset, madam." I had no idea a handset could be as thirsty as to get itself a drink. So equally insensitively, I accused my mother and daughter of sweating into my phone. They reacted by excluding me from family activities. Then I was told, "Madam, it is charging only, but it has to be plugged in at a certain angle." That was it. I am, as all my family and friends will tell you, not of the fainthearted variety (unless you send me to a beauty salon), so I upped the battle. While I began with acute-angled politeness, I drifted into much aggressive posturing, despairing, screaming, and shouting, till the Reliance people promised to deal with it and gave me a stop gap handset which had Playboy written on it. I think they really really wanted me out of the showroom as other customers seemed to be leaving just as I began Rajnikanth's dialogue of "Enna Rascalan...". The Playboy phone seemed to have none of the vitality you would associate with Hugh Hefner’s brand (may be it was from China – imagine an opium-tranced HH?). It just about had enough energy for the one last hurrah, the final phone a friend lifeline - just one call I had, like criminals arraigned for the first time in CSI.
I turned to the power of the pen and wrote an impassioned letter to a leading city newspaper accusing all and sundry of robbing me of my rights as a customer. While one colleague maintains that my letter published in English was Greek to him, it actually woke up Samsung regional heads who swung into action and actually fixed my phone. Good on them! It’s been a pretty faithful relationship since then.
However, it's totally another matter that I flung the cellphone down two sets of stairs in an extremely extenuating circumstance. I still remember it in the air very Matrix-Neo-like as I hurled it and watched it land on the floor, make a smooth suicidal slide towards the long flight of stairs...bump itself on many a step...till my daughter rescued it at the bottom of the stairs, and held up its smashed display with her usual incredulous look. Oh well may be the phone had enough of me too.
Amazingly, it not only worked better than before, but also gave me the unique tagline:
The iSmash – coz I smashed it!
So I have this just one of a kind cellphone, personalized to perfection. Even though I say so myself. Others usually greet it with:
Oh, do they still have phones like that? (STARE)
But aunty, you had this cracked phone at Ayesha’s birthday last year, too! (So, your point is...?)
Yours is the only phone that can take a photo and the output is a readymade collage! (STARE HARD)
You better change that cracked display before you have pieces of glass inside your ear. (FYI: My hearing power is better than yours)
It actually has a camera? (STARE HARDER)
You can’t find your phone? No worries, no one would want it – it must be where you left it (This at a crowded wedding – and yes, I found it, and yes it was where I had left it)
To add to my misery, my daughter has joined the Android Adda. She puts her phone next to mine and pointedly says, “The Samsung Y(Young) and the Samsung O(Old)”
Then the counter cry is raised, “O for Old? It should be P, for Prehistoric!”
I really like my phone. I’m really attached to it and it doesn’t bother me that its display is cracked and the buttons are worn down. Sure it might not be a very smart phone or much of a status symbol, but why would I need a phone to make a statement? I just need a phone to make calls.
Besides what’s with these touchy-feely smart phones anyway? Once when my daughter’s phone rang, all I wanted to do was receive that call, but this green arrow on it kept insisting ‘Move to the right’.
Choking on their laughter, the Android gang asked, “So you moved yourself to the right, did you?”
No I didn’t, thank you very much, but why should answering a call be like a dance number:
Move it to the right, and take a call like this
Take it to the left and end a call like that…
You can bump it like this
And tap it like that… and the dance continues…
And the other day, I was at a PTA meeting and somehow, something touched the phone to dial the family doctor who was about to walk into a surgery.
There’s an Apps for everything except one that can earn you money without working. There are a variety of keyboard that are unfathomable to me. They have voice assistants who get muddled up at the sound of my name and announce me as incorrect data.
To have the world at their fingertips is such a high; never mind that their fingerprints are eroding in the process, never mind the constant texting, and twittering, never mind the fact that one is more in touch with the phone than the spouse. Hail the whole new breed of Android Loyal Web-bers* out there with worn out fingerprints, and burgeoning collections of Apps trawling the internet till kingdom come, until what will exist one day is the myth of fingerprints.
All I need is a phone to call family, friends and Basha the vegetable vendor and hallelujah, at the moment, I can!
*The credit for this nomenclature being duly attributed to Ayesha;)
