Why the myphone is better than my phone ....

I am not a person who gets irritated easily. If you do decide to sit behind me in class and throw tiny paper balls at my head, it would take several hundred such paper balls to get me to turn around and give you a piece of my mind and several thousand such paper balls to get me to kick you sorry arse all over town. If you decide to park your car at the office parking lot in such a way that it eats up half of my usual parking spot, I would happily go park somewhere else and carry on with life while not pondering on your lack of parking skills which would be understandable if you are a woman and inexcusable if you’re a guy. Basically it takes a lot of effort to get me out of my unflappable state but it takes very little effort for me to irritate people to an extent that they want to toss me out the window. Even if they have only just met me. Like the tragically birdbrained myphone messiah I met last week.

Apparently first impressions are supposed to be lasting impressions. I have heard my friend talking about this girl a fair bit and she seemed interesting enough, which falls somewhere between being as boring as a documentary on the physics behind drying paint and as interesting as a full fledged, all out, edge of the seats, stand up brawl between two top MMA fighters. The initial weekend plan was to head out for lunch and watch a movie and my friend had invited this girl for reasons that are still not clear to me. Why he is her friend is a bigger mystery but Im jumping the gun. We decided to meet up for a light lunch (the seats in theatres are extremely conducive to sleeping which means you have to go a second time to watch the parts which you missed) and then catch the movie and unfortunately just after introducing us to each other, my friend received a call from his bitter err better half and vanished before I could ask him to at least hand over the tickets.

Our conversation was as light as our meal and I couldn’t really complain until I made the mistake of asking the girl what the time was. In a flash she had pulled out her myphone and a couple of swishes later she told me the time. In my defense I had asked her the time only because she had a watch on her wrist. Since she seemed rather proud of her little techno gizmo and was probably the type who didn’t know anything more than dialing and sending sms’s on such a complicated phone, I asked her how good the phone was and whether she had any apps on it. Cardinal error!

“Of course it’s got a load of apps on it” she exclaimed as she pulled her chair closer to mine to show off her phone. Now being something of an annual occurrence, I usually am not one to complain if a girl would like to sit close to me but this time warning bells were going off like air raid sirens. “Check out this application, it shows me all the different footprint marks of wild animals and it can even tell you how old and heavy the animal is depending on the depth of the foot mark”. An animal lover, looks like my spidey senses were wrong this time. I asked her “So I take it that you’re an animal lover. How often do you go to wildlife sanctuaries?” I could’ve sworn she shuddered a little when she said “Im terrified of wild animals, I just like watching them on the tele.”

While I wondered how she would use the app, she excitedly moved on to the next application which was called G-Park. “This is like the best application ever”, she exclaimed, ”when you park your car all you need to do is turn this application on and when you want to go back click on ‘Where did I park my car’ and it will guide you back to it. Isn’t that amazing?” I had to agree, this seemed to be like a pretty nifty little app. Just to try it out, I clicked ‘Where did I park my car’ on her phone and after several minutes of analyzing the directions I came to the conclusion that she had parked her car in the men’s restroom.

I’m not sure if the puzzled look on my face gave me away but she seemed to realize that I wasn’t really buying the whole myphone story and so she decided to further try and convince me by showing off the next application which was meant to capture the first letters that a baby writes on a myphone and captures it for posterities sake. “I didn’t know schools have given up on handwriting” I cheekily mumbled “In our time we used to get a rap on the knuckles for not writing our letters properly. How times have changed ……”

As my voice trailed and I tried to keep a straight face, she realized that it would really take something to get me onto off the skeptics list and onto the myphone bandwagon.

“Do you know to make a reef knot”

“A what not?”

“A reef knot!”

“Of course not!”

“What if you suddenly had to make a reef knot”

“Why on earth would I want to make a reef knot?”

“Assume you did ….”

“Ok but before I do that could you explain to me what is a reef knot?”

“Argh! It’s a knot. And stop asking questions and assume you need to make a reef knot, do you know how to do it?”

“Of course not”

“Well the myphone has an application that teaches you how to make any knot in 10 easy steps”

I will admit it, I had to agree that the myphone was useful for something. Even if the only knots I ever needed to make were the ones on my sneakers. She insisted on demonstrating how anyone could make a reef knot and proceeded to take two straws and attempt to make the knot. After about a minute she had to let go of the straws and pick up the phone to check the next step. After starting from scratch she managed to complete 2 steps and had to drop the straws again and check for the third step. Again she had to start from the beginning and each time she put the straws down they managed to completely disentangle themselves and in the process raise her blood pressure a couple of notches.

Not wanting her to feel worse, without a single trace of sincerity, I agreed that the app was a pretty useful one and that the phone was a good buy. Now there is nothing in the world that you can do to a myphone owner that is worse than that because we all know that they have paid more than a bundle for bragging rights and an ego boost and a phone that is perpetually behind the competition in terms of features.

To settle the matter she pulled out what she thought was her ace card. “Check out this app, it can tell you whether it is day or night and where the sun or the moon is at that particular time. Can your phone do that?” she said with a silly victorious look plastered all over her face. “Of course not” I replied nonchalantly. “I just look out the window if I want to know where the sun is …..”

She stormed off without a word and with a rather disgusted look just as my friend returned back from his phone call. “Where did she go?” he enquired quizzically as he watched her disappear into the crowd. “You’de better go after her and help her find her car, I have a feeling she’s not going to be able to find it” I remarked in all innocence.

“But why did she leave?”

“You’ve done it this time. Can I at least have my ticket, the movie is about to start”

“Here take your ticket, at least tell me why she pulled a Houdini on us”

As I got up I said “You and your phone. It was pretty rude the way you disappeared like that. I think you managed to irritate her …..”