Pity The Fools

I got a new phone this week. A smart phone. And it's beautiful.

Oh here we go, I can hear you mutter under your breath. Another technology bore banging on about his latest bit of cyber-bling (in my head you say things like cyber-bling. And you have shit hair. Deal with it).

I used to be like you. I shunned technology. I didn't get an iPod until 2009. Anytime an apple fanboy would proudly brandish the latest £1000 quid infinity cube I'd respond in kind with a flourish of my £15 worth of Nokia and an invitation for them to place their hardware into various handy bodily orifices.

To be fair, they really don't help themselves. Apple advertising is dogged by a level of smugness matched by only those who didn't vote for Nick Clegg in May. Case in point; the 'what is ipad?' advertisement, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZrqiBtUZo&feature=channel which assumes that the product is so revolutionary it can defy grammatical convention itself and become a proper noun. I'd recommend sending email's to Apple in which your insults treat language with similar disregard; 'Ipad shit is', 'What is Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs is smegma', that sort of thing.

But eventually I couldn't resist any more. My brick, whilst not only inferior to all other phones made in the last five years except that it was less likely to shatter when you hurled it away in frustration, was costing me about £30 a fortnight; due to O2's Pay As You Go rates being based on US research documents into the best way of torturing Guantanemo Bay detainees. So I went contract, and go a free handset to boot. Not an iphone though. Some wounds run too deep.

And I was impressed, at first. Half of my life suddenly shrank to the size of large cracker and slotted neatly into my pocket. I could look up things on the internet, access maps, listen to music, play games, all that jazz. It was everything I'd expected.

Then, maybe a day after getting it, it started to rain. I pulled the phone out my pocket to make a text and saw a little windscreen wiper drift across the screen and clear away a cluster of digital raindrops. And my heart melted.

This is what I love about modern technology. Not the practical things, not the huge leaps forward in terms of revolutionising the way we live and communicate. Fidgety little butterfly-chaser that I am, I love the useless things. The one's made only for the love. The app that becomes a zippo lighter. The app that becomes a he-loves-me/loves-me-not daisy. The app that becomes a replica revolver that you hold up to your head in front of your mates in what they think is a joke but is actually a desperate attempt to commincate your feeling of desperation and loneliness in an uncaring world. The Mr. T soundboard.

Yet people around me seemed less keen to share in my excitement. Half-an-hour after getting it I was sharply instructed to 'stop going on about your bloody phone'. The next day, whilst going through the slog of re-entering all my contacts into the phone book, two friends came to visit me and damn near castrated me when I didn't immediately put my phone down and give them a bloody puppet show.

Which I think is a little unfair. I'd just been given what was, essentially, the equivalent of a fucking magic wand, and now was suddenly expected to treat it nonchalantly, as if this portable deity was the sort of thing you received every day.

This is the wrong way to treat such objects. I think we should take a step back once in a while and appreciate just how fantastic these little things are. Just like nature, or literature, or art, we need to make time to be amazed by them. Otherwise, what's their point? Oh, other than to see how many presses of the 'I pity the fool' button it takes to make someone want to stab you. Tee-hee.