My love affair with the iPad lasted only a few days before it all went horribly wrong. This is tragic, because I overcame several major planks of my obsessive compulsive disorder and conquered some of my most rampant technological demons in order to walk into that Vodafone shop and say the words: ‘Can I have one of those iPad thingys, please?’
‘iPad 2, or iPad 3?’ said the red-shirted assistant.
Oh, the horror. I didn’t know there was more than one model available at any given time. I had blithely assumed that 3 usurped 2. If it was a choice, lord only knew which one I wanted. I stood there mutely.
‘Do you want the new one?’ said the red shirt, already losing interest and starting to fiddle with his smart phone.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘The new one. Whatever’s the latest. Or, wait, maybe I should get the one that’s smallest. Is one smaller than the other?’
The red shirt looked at me like I was frightening away the proper customers — men with floppy hair wearing Converse trainers and carrying satchels.
I hadn’t felt this out of place since I walked into Woolworths aged ten, with my dad, and tried to buy a cassette tape of Hello, I Must Be Going!
‘Can I have Phil Collins’s new record, please?’ I seem to remember innocently incanting, as my father stood behind me looking at his watch and reminding me I was going to be late for my tennis lesson.
‘Do you mean…’ said the spiky-haired assistant, pausing for scorn, ‘his latest album?’
The same look scorched into me now. But eventually the red shirt called Dan went out the back to get me an iPad 3 and before long the shiny black screen was making little clucking sounds.
I quite liked it, which is not usually what happens with me and technology. When I got a BlackBerry, I took it home grudgingly and resolved to hate it with every fibre of my being until my dying breath. Slowly, I grew to tolerate it, then respect it, then sleep with it under my pillow, then enter a state of symbiosis with it, forgoing the ability to make a cup of tea without having it clamped inside my palm.
But with the iPad it was love at first sight. I sat on the train stroking it all the way home, where I switched it diligently to wireless, as instructed by the red shirt, and did nothing but look up pointless things on the internet on it from dawn till dusk.
Then I got in the car — the boyfriend was driving — and on the way up to visit my parents I tried to send someone an email and found myself locked out.
I went back to the shop where they checked for vital signs and couldn’t find a phone connection. They took out the sim card and put it in another iPad and the phone line worked so they told me I had to have a new one. ‘No! Please!’ I pleaded. I tried to explain I had bonded with the first one. But it was no good. They took the only iPad I will ever love, and put it in a box and buried it under the counter.
A red shirt called Nathan assured me that the new iPad they were now taking out of its box was identical to the iPad they had just wrenched from my arms. But I was inconsolable. I poked the imposter suspiciously, waiting for it to reveal how it was inferior.
I took it home, shoved it in a drawer, and a few days later took it out to try using it, but I couldn’t get a phone line.
Back at the shop, a red shirt called Lee took charge this time. He wasn’t even going to entertain the idea of the thing not working. He asked me if I had tried turning it off and on. Then he pressed two buttons and the thing sprang to life with a phone signal.
I was virtually hysterical.
‘But, but…why didn’t Nathan do that with the other one?’
Lee shrugged. I wanted to scream. I wanted to get behind that counter and start ransacking the place to find My iPad (or should I say MyPad?).
Instead, hyperventilating and sweating, I asked Lee to please explain very slowly what he had just done so that I could do it again when I got home and the thing stopped working.
‘It’s simple,’ he said, as the blood drained rapidly to my feet and I swooned against the counter. ‘Just press these two buttons at the same time. Sometimes…’ he added, as I slid down to the floor to put my head between my knees, ‘these things just need a hard restart.’
I know the feeling.
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