Xavier Toby
July 10, 2013
The Age
Inside every Apple Store there’s really only ever four things for sale. iPhone, iPod, iPad or Macbook. Which you can get at about a hundred different stores. In the same shopping centre. For exactly the same price.
There’s also the staff in that same shirt with hipster flourishes like over-styled hair, subtle tattoos and designer glasses who, if they didn’t work for Apple, they’d be selling Foxtel subscriptions, or raffle tickets.
Then up the back are the ‘geniuses’. When they’re not at work, we all know they’re shooting at each other and designing farms and chatting up hot girls. Virtually.
At the register there’s always that one hot girl in black-rimmed glasses. The nerds are too scared to talk to her and she’s already knocked back all the sales guys since she’s dating the assistant manager.
The Apple Store is like a really smug cult.
Whenever a new Apple Store opens people still line up overnight just to be the first in there. It’s not like they’re selling anything worth lining up for. Such as tickets to the Grand Final. Or a Kylie concert. Or another John Farnham comeback tour. Come on, who wouldn’t gladly go another round of ‘Whispering Jack’?
But despite a company that’s got about $76 billion in cash, you’d think their i-thingy’s would be waterproof.
Every iPhone can still be destroyed by something that’s so abundant that it falls from the sky, and we’ve got it on tap. It’s like having a flying car that melts when it rains.
So many people I know have ruined an iPhone by spilling something on it. Which we all know is code for, “I dropped it in the toilet”. What a person chooses to do next, I believe is one of the greatest dilemmas facing society today.
There’s poo in that toilet. And a phone. And what if it still works? It’s going to cost hundreds for a new one. How much would it take for a person to potentially touch their own excrement?
Everyone has a number, and it’s often a very different number. Finding out is a great party game. Play it at your next dinner party, just make sure until everyone has finished eating.
If it were me, I’d be straight in there. No hesitation, I’d be immediately into that toilet for that phone. Doesn’t even have to be my phone. Or my poo.
So I took my poo phone into the Apple Store and the genius up the back told me, “This phone has been water damaged.”
I replied, “Hey genius, I’m not here because it’s working. Can you fix it?”
He told me it’d be cheaper to get a new one.
So I told him about the time I had sex with a real girl and his head exploded. It was filled with green Skittles, which was a surprise. I thought it would’ve been filled with loneliness and disappointment.
OK, that didn’t happen.
What I did do was go up to the three fat corporate customers staring at iPhone 5’s and announced, “The battery life on these is shit. Also, still not waterproof. Watch as I demonstrate.”
After tipping water over all three, I now know what it’s like to be thrown out of an Apple Store. It took seven of those nerds to get me out of there.
And the hot girl at the register? I totally got her phone number. Well I would’ve if my phone wasn’t “water damaged”. And the court hadn’t ordered me to stay 20 metres from every Apple Store.
Alright, none of that happened either.
What did happen was that I left quietly, and then bought a secondhand iPhone 3 on ebay.
A week later, the hipster making my coffee noticed it and exclaimed, “Is that an iPhone 3? More like third world.”
After he finished laughing at himself, he continued.
“Do you go home and plug it into your Commodore 64 to recharge? Download all your music onto a tape? I’ve got a cassette tape cover for my iPhone 5. Ironically.”
He pointed me out to his over-tattooed co-workers and added, “I bet you still even make calls on landline. Or a payphone. Do they even still exist?”
So I paid for my one black coffee with a credit card, and a signature. Which made his head explode. It was filled with music that nobody could understand, from bands that never existed, played on instruments that hadn’t been invented yet.
Xavier Toby is a writer and comedian. Follow him (@xaviertoby) on Twitter or find him on Facebook.
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