Posted by A.J. Axline on Jul 28, 2010 (148 views, 0 comments) Rating: 2.43
The Silence of the iPhones
The cell was fastidiously clean, neatly arranged, and very, very white. The bunk linens were white. The table and chair were white. There was a picture of a zebra; he had used correction fluid to white-out the black stripes. The tunic and pants he wore were white... but he had removed all of the buttons from them, for reasons known only to him.
"We don't know how his mind works, or where his power comes from," they had told me. "We only know that we fear it. We fear what it might eventually make us become."
"It was good of you to see me, Mr. Jobs," I said nervously.
"I'm always willing to speak to customers about their concerns with our products," he said with a smile.
The air around his body shimmered briefly, then subsided.
"Well sir, it's about your new phone," I said. "It seems as though there is a design flaw, that--"
"No," he said.
"I'm sorry?"
"A common error, a petty, common error. There is no design flaw," he said, shaking his head bemusedly. "You are simply using it incorrectly."
I raised an eyebrow. "It's a phone."
"THE phone," he smiled. "The most magical, wonderful, powerful, magnificent, ridiculously thin..."
"It's a phone gadget," I shrugged. "You hold in your hand like this, and you--"
The cell roiled in a maddening pattern of unreality. He was out of his chair and against the bulletproof glass barrier before I could scream.
"NO! I DON'T HOLD IT IN MY HAND LIKE THAT!" he hissed. His spittle etched into the glass barrier like acid.
I bolted down the hallway, screeching as if the hounds of Hell were at my heels.
A week later, he granted me a second interview.
"Okay," I said, wiping my brow with a handkerchief, "so you don't hold it like that. But, you must admit that other people could, in fact, hold their phone like that."
"They are flawed creatures, weak, inappropriate consumers wallowing in their own tedious preconceived offal," he said, drinking green tea from a white porcelain cup. His teeth were very white. "They must be collected and brought to our Genius Bars. There, they can be retrained in the proper way." There were invisible snakes in the air around him, distorting reality in rhythm to his words.
"The proper way... to hold a phone," I said.
"This is the obstacle I face. I create new, wondrous objects of technological genius, and the people who tithe... who give their money to us, cannot adapt, cannot evolve. They are simians trying to text on a mammoth femur. I love them, but I pity them as well. They must learn the proper way, and I am the teacher, I am the WAY."
The twisting snakes made it hard to think. "But, isn't it true that--"
The drawer in the cell door slammed open in my direction with a resounding crash that nearly made me jump out of my skin. Fearfully, I leaned over and peered inside.
"A free case," he said, clearly disgusted and bored with the conversation. "A piece of rubber from China worth less than one of my pinky fingernail clippings. Wrap it around the 'phone gadget' like a prophylactic. Your inadequacies have been addressed, talking monkey."
"I don't think it's fair to be dismissive when a product clearly doesn't--" I said.
"We're done here," he snarled. He turned his chair, and resumed removing the buttons from a new pair of pyjamas.
