When I walk past Radio Shack, the Apple Store, or even come within a quarter mile of Fry's Electronics I can hear them all sniggering. All of the laptops, desktops, printers, scanners, cell phones and all of the i-things. They sense me. It must be their 3g networks. They know when I'm coming and they all agree to do the most mind boggling things ever.
Normally, I steer clear of electronic stores of all type. I have this need to believe that I am an intelligent human being, and as soon as I get around a gizmo all of my beliefs fly out of the window. You thought you were smart? How come you can't even get that cell phone to show you its key pad? You're never going to get a PhD if you can't even find the "hint" button on your friend's laptop to show you their password. Give up, loser!
You know that scene in Office Space where that really angry desk-nerd-guy can't get the printer to do anything he wants it to do? Yeah, that's pretty much me with anything you can plug in, recharge, or make wireless. Though, instead of me throwing it out of a window, the device usually convinces me to jump myself. They have that much control over me.
I swear, my mother knows more about computers than I do, and she didn't even get complete access to one until about three years ago. I grew up in the technology era. I'm 22 friggin years old, yet every time some new electronic device comes out, I scratch my head. I have no idea who came up with this strategy, but it does nothing; absolutely nothing.
About a year ago I upgraded to a Blackberry because I began to believe the hype. "The Blackberry will change your life... it will transform you from Disorganized Schizophrenic to Multitasking Guru... it will keep your life on track, and there are so many cool amazing things you can do with it... your life will be exponentially better..." I thought that if I could get in with the BB, then it would give the rest of the Electronic World the heads up that I was cool and then they would all stop picking on me.
Up until last week, all I could do with my blackberry was call my mother. Ok, maybe thats an exaggeration. I'm a master texter, so I could text my mother too, but that's pretty much it. My friend and her boyfriend told me I was a "dumb ass smart phone user" which, if I didn't already know, as well understand my complete inability to grasp anything created in this century, would have really hurt my feelings. So I decided to start learning how to use this damn phone.
I, of course, went to my personal guru for guidance, and as usual, Google had all of my answers. I can now buy tickets for shows I don't have the money to see via the ticket-master app, have turned my text message program into a pseudo-i phone messaging system, can BBM 5 of my friends, tweet on a whim (though, I'm still not sure how/what/why to tweet though I did tweet about a very interesting man I met at a cupcake shop...story to come), play this game where I pop bubbles while I wait for classes to start and or assholes in front of me to get out of my way, and get directions anytime I need to by using google's wonderful offspring google maps apps.
While it seems my blackberry is on my side for now, perhaps it is only setting me up for a giant joke where all of these apps that I will no doubt come to depend on decide to crash all at the very same time and my life crumbles and I roll into a ball and cry. Blackberry, should this prove to be a cruel, cruel joke you and your comrades are playing on me, please have mercy on me and let me keep my bubble popping game. I'm working on my high score, here.
