AD 3
Option 9 (Not an Armchair in Sight) by Miss Pokeno
I had a Sony Ericsson phone ...sweet..dead simple and very old.
On occasion the buttons would get a little stuck and I had to shout to be heard but I was happy enough with it . You made phone calls...you got phone calls and if the transmission went a bit fuzzy you just laughed it off and tried again. It was the sort of indifferent love affair I’ve always had with technology that suits me just fine.
No big deal.
Then some well-intentioned person who shall remain nameless thought it was time to uptech me and gave me a Blackberry. A Blackberry Storm to be precise...no buttons...touch screen...yippee yi yo..
Right from the start I hated that Blackberry and it hated me. .
The touch screen wouldn’t connect with my finger tips..it slid out of my grasp and shimmied to the floor...it ran out of battery mid conversation and its slippery gloss exterior reminded me of a particularly nasty music business manager I had the misfortune to know in the 80s.
It had apps...it had options ...it had every little tricky smart ass choice you could think of and all of them just led you through a labyrinth of useless options or ended up with a fast talking woman who claimed to be from San Francisco even though we both knew she was working the complaints line from New Delhi.
I hated that phone with a passion.
And every time I touched its smug little screen I hated it more.
I considered dropping it in the bath.
I thought about throwing it from the back door of the number 77 bus and I even entertained the idea of putting it in the oven at the highest temperature possible just to see what would happen.
Somehow though every death scenario I plotted for the damn thing just seemed dismally underwhelming compared to the magnitude of the venom I was feeling towards it.
I wanted sensation and spectacle.
I wanted revenge.
A public humiliation.
I wanted to batter it...stab it through its posh little circuit board..smash it to tiny smithereens and whats more I wanted to enjoy every wretched moment of its destruction.
I wanted control.
I wanted catharsis
I wanted my old phone back
It was driving me crazy
I was driving everyone else crazy
I started to feel like a Sun reader baying at the gallows for Gary Glitters balls.
I began to scare myself.
I began to scare everyone else.
Then I told Jimmy
and Jimmy said “Why don’t you just nail it to a tree.”
Sweet.
Easy.
A perfect prozac moment.
