Implausible as it might seem, they did. As stories go this is not in the same class as "dog ate my homework" which is fictional, and is a hope rather than reality. Termites really did eat up my smartphone.
Well, they sort of did.
For a while now I have been hankering for a smart phone, if only to appear smart in the presence of smartphone cognoscenti which is just about everyone under the age of 30 these days. I have always been fascinated by phones that could sing, dance and generally do the things that I myself can not.
My first phone was a Nokia brick which could double up as a lethal weapon in an emergency. It so happened that I never had to use it as such, Mumbai being a non-violent sort of city at least where I tended to move. It did destroy many a shirt and used to create a suspicious bulge when secreted in the inner pocket of my jacket or a an embarrassing one in my trouser pocket. Those were the days of the famous "One Black Coffee please" advert, and size (of phones anyway) was inversely proportional to the impression it created. Ericsson sold the teeniest of flip-phones which could be concealed in the female palm (as in the advert) as it cupped her comely, tilted, face. Matters appear to have reverted to norm and now size (as in screen acreage) matters once again.
My second phone was the size and shape of a largish pebble with smooth, rounded, edges and had a lurid green display. It was also called pebble, I think, albeit without any vowels in it. One could, if sufficiently practiced and suitably cool, flip the keyboard lid open with the thumb of the hand holding it when a call came through. I could do it, but my friend needed both hands; fat lot of good this ability did, for my company sent him to N.Y and I am retired and in Chennai. Still for a while I was cool and he wasn't, which isn't saying much because he is a Gujju and I am not. All that cool flipping inevitably led to the lid coming off permanently and it wasn't cool to carry a flip-phone without a flippable lid. I gave it to my daughter who had a long commute each day to the seamier side of Mumbai and in my opinion needed some form of self defense.
I replaced the pebble with, I am ashamed to admit, a phone in girly colours. I was going someplace which required a "world phone" and the only one I could afford came in girly colours. No sooner I returned from the journey than I switched back to my old pebble, much to my daughter's discomfiture at losing her personal concealed weapon - an all-black pebble is not nearly as conspicuous, even without its flip-lid, as one that was a fluorescent shade of blue.
Thereafter I quickly replaced the pebble with the legendary Nokia 6210 - small, light, grey and powerful - with the pebble reverting to my daughter and the blue girly phone going to my wife. This one was and still remains my all-time favourite. It could store 500 names with 5 numbers each, could connect to the net via something called WAP, could sync with my laptop / PC, and had an effective calendar.
You could even exchange business cards through its infra red port. It had a concealed antenna, which was uber cool, and yet it could pick up weak signals. But alas, it was monochromatic and the display was dot-matrix LCD. If these attributes sound like something you don't want to step on, that is because they are, in today's world at least. I must admit though, that I experience pangs of regret for having ditched my faithful companion, when I see Brits still carrying it, a full 13 years after it was introduced.
I could do all sorts of stuff with it, including surfing the internet from my laptop anywhere, any time. This last one might not surprise anyone today, but in the days before dongles and 3G, internet on the move was nothing short of miraculous. I understand that those crafty Finns could do a lot more with the 6210. They're all a bit crazy, the Finns, car-racing on frozen lakes and starting companies that switch from making pencils to paper to TVs to mobile phones (a la Nokia), when not enjoying saunas or singing joiks.
It was a very good phone, and the call quality was excellent - those were the days when a phone was a device to talk to someone and not for watching jerky videos or for baring what you did last summer which you proceeded to regret for the rest of your life. I saved a bomb on new shirts and was saved from excessive frisking at airports and embarrassment in the presence of ladies. Despite getting a bit hot next to my ear, its battery lasted a three or four days on a single charge under heavy use. I got a special kick out of carrying it, for at that time I used to work closely with the French and this phone was streets ahead of anything the Frenchies had - for one they had to pull out their antennae with their teeth when a call came through and I didn't have to.
Then dawned the age of the Palm Pilot and every one had to have a PDA with stylus and all. That's about as far as PDA got in India. Social types like Shobha De did a lot of air-kissing and engaged in various types of PDA but the vast majority of us had to be content with intently staring at out Laptop screens while the fortunate ones with Palm Pilots checked their mails with a certain insouciance.
My first PDA was a clunky Taiwanese knock-off running a Microsoft operating system. Soon it broke down with a broken battery cover - big ambitions humbled by the smallest of things. Then came HTC's PDA, the O2 XDAII. It sounded like something out of Lockheed skunk-works but was actually a phone and a PDA running a version of Windows. It had a stylus but also a back-lit sliding keyboard. This last named bathed your face in an eerie, blue, otherworldly glow when the lights were dimmed on a late night flight. It was good to be Blue Man, if only for a short while, playing solitaire.
The XDA II never failed to impress those who couldn't afford its asking price (very steep) or master its operations (mostly the socialites). It read my handwriting well and I have had full-fledged reviews with my lieutenants even when I was far from base. It was, in short, awesome. Like The Brick it was heavy, but without being able to create a suspicious or an impressive bulge in the right places.
The Blackberry had arrived by then and I was provided with one when my boss decided I had to be available twenty-four seven. Or may be it simply had to do with my position in the organization - you see, in India, provision of phones, cars, and the like depend on your position in the hierarchy and not on whether your job required them. I found the BB capable as it was, very plebeian, without the reassuring heft of The Brick, the gee-wizardry of the 6210, or the "convergence" of the O2. Its only useful feature, the Map, had been disabled by the wizards in IT, so I was still lost in the streets of Paris where its possession would have given me a clear edge over the Alcatel-wielding Frenchies.
I now became the carrier of two mobile phones, much like the safari-suited businessmen and fixers for whom I have had nothing but unconcealed disdain. Thereafter followed a stream of nondescript phones including some Nokias and a brace of Sony Ericssons. Somewhere along the way my daughter gave up the security of the Pebble for the sleek lightness of the 6210. Monochrome screens gave way to coloured ones, and the shrill monotonic ring was replaced by polyphonic ones. Cameras were also incorporated into the phones. Probably the worst ever picture of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence was taken by me on a Sony Ericsson.
Apple introduced the iPhone and wanted you to lose the stylus in favour of your index finger. Believe it or not, the world agreed and was willing to pay many times what it cost to make the iPhone for the pleasure of wearing its index fingers thin. Somehow the good people at Apple managed to convince the general people that their phone was "smart" the way other ones weren't. Smart phones were born and they became all the rage. Suddenly Nokia was on a slippery slope and was headed rapidly downhill.
I couldn't afford the asking price for an iPhone and till date do not have one, save my son's hand-me-down for a brief while. When I had it, I hated the way it limited me to the Apple Ecosystem, thus setting up healthy annuities for Apple and a constant drain on my finances. So when an opportunity presented itself, I rid myself of the iPhone and hired an extra help at home with the money thus saved.
With more and more people flaunting smartphones I was developing an incurable case of screen envy.
A Samsung today needs half an acre of screen to do what my old XDA could do nine years ago with just 2.5 inches. My 6210 did not hang and did not have to be reset now and then. I didn't look like an idiot even with The Brick clamped to me years, the way I would with any of the so called "Phablets". But despite all that my smartphone envy has not dimmed; it has been growing undiminished. I finally decided to give in, even if it meant giving up the extra help at home. I zeroed in on a Windows smartphone, the Nokia 925.
That's when a termite army decided to chomp through half my kitchen.
Well, they sort of did.
For a while now I have been hankering for a smart phone, if only to appear smart in the presence of smartphone cognoscenti which is just about everyone under the age of 30 these days. I have always been fascinated by phones that could sing, dance and generally do the things that I myself can not.
My first phone was a Nokia brick which could double up as a lethal weapon in an emergency. It so happened that I never had to use it as such, Mumbai being a non-violent sort of city at least where I tended to move. It did destroy many a shirt and used to create a suspicious bulge when secreted in the inner pocket of my jacket or a an embarrassing one in my trouser pocket. Those were the days of the famous "One Black Coffee please" advert, and size (of phones anyway) was inversely proportional to the impression it created. Ericsson sold the teeniest of flip-phones which could be concealed in the female palm (as in the advert) as it cupped her comely, tilted, face. Matters appear to have reverted to norm and now size (as in screen acreage) matters once again.
My second phone was the size and shape of a largish pebble with smooth, rounded, edges and had a lurid green display. It was also called pebble, I think, albeit without any vowels in it. One could, if sufficiently practiced and suitably cool, flip the keyboard lid open with the thumb of the hand holding it when a call came through. I could do it, but my friend needed both hands; fat lot of good this ability did, for my company sent him to N.Y and I am retired and in Chennai. Still for a while I was cool and he wasn't, which isn't saying much because he is a Gujju and I am not. All that cool flipping inevitably led to the lid coming off permanently and it wasn't cool to carry a flip-phone without a flippable lid. I gave it to my daughter who had a long commute each day to the seamier side of Mumbai and in my opinion needed some form of self defense.
I replaced the pebble with, I am ashamed to admit, a phone in girly colours. I was going someplace which required a "world phone" and the only one I could afford came in girly colours. No sooner I returned from the journey than I switched back to my old pebble, much to my daughter's discomfiture at losing her personal concealed weapon - an all-black pebble is not nearly as conspicuous, even without its flip-lid, as one that was a fluorescent shade of blue.
Thereafter I quickly replaced the pebble with the legendary Nokia 6210 - small, light, grey and powerful - with the pebble reverting to my daughter and the blue girly phone going to my wife. This one was and still remains my all-time favourite. It could store 500 names with 5 numbers each, could connect to the net via something called WAP, could sync with my laptop / PC, and had an effective calendar.
You could even exchange business cards through its infra red port. It had a concealed antenna, which was uber cool, and yet it could pick up weak signals. But alas, it was monochromatic and the display was dot-matrix LCD. If these attributes sound like something you don't want to step on, that is because they are, in today's world at least. I must admit though, that I experience pangs of regret for having ditched my faithful companion, when I see Brits still carrying it, a full 13 years after it was introduced.
I could do all sorts of stuff with it, including surfing the internet from my laptop anywhere, any time. This last one might not surprise anyone today, but in the days before dongles and 3G, internet on the move was nothing short of miraculous. I understand that those crafty Finns could do a lot more with the 6210. They're all a bit crazy, the Finns, car-racing on frozen lakes and starting companies that switch from making pencils to paper to TVs to mobile phones (a la Nokia), when not enjoying saunas or singing joiks.
It was a very good phone, and the call quality was excellent - those were the days when a phone was a device to talk to someone and not for watching jerky videos or for baring what you did last summer which you proceeded to regret for the rest of your life. I saved a bomb on new shirts and was saved from excessive frisking at airports and embarrassment in the presence of ladies. Despite getting a bit hot next to my ear, its battery lasted a three or four days on a single charge under heavy use. I got a special kick out of carrying it, for at that time I used to work closely with the French and this phone was streets ahead of anything the Frenchies had - for one they had to pull out their antennae with their teeth when a call came through and I didn't have to.
Then dawned the age of the Palm Pilot and every one had to have a PDA with stylus and all. That's about as far as PDA got in India. Social types like Shobha De did a lot of air-kissing and engaged in various types of PDA but the vast majority of us had to be content with intently staring at out Laptop screens while the fortunate ones with Palm Pilots checked their mails with a certain insouciance.
My first PDA was a clunky Taiwanese knock-off running a Microsoft operating system. Soon it broke down with a broken battery cover - big ambitions humbled by the smallest of things. Then came HTC's PDA, the O2 XDAII. It sounded like something out of Lockheed skunk-works but was actually a phone and a PDA running a version of Windows. It had a stylus but also a back-lit sliding keyboard. This last named bathed your face in an eerie, blue, otherworldly glow when the lights were dimmed on a late night flight. It was good to be Blue Man, if only for a short while, playing solitaire.
The XDA II never failed to impress those who couldn't afford its asking price (very steep) or master its operations (mostly the socialites). It read my handwriting well and I have had full-fledged reviews with my lieutenants even when I was far from base. It was, in short, awesome. Like The Brick it was heavy, but without being able to create a suspicious or an impressive bulge in the right places.
The Blackberry had arrived by then and I was provided with one when my boss decided I had to be available twenty-four seven. Or may be it simply had to do with my position in the organization - you see, in India, provision of phones, cars, and the like depend on your position in the hierarchy and not on whether your job required them. I found the BB capable as it was, very plebeian, without the reassuring heft of The Brick, the gee-wizardry of the 6210, or the "convergence" of the O2. Its only useful feature, the Map, had been disabled by the wizards in IT, so I was still lost in the streets of Paris where its possession would have given me a clear edge over the Alcatel-wielding Frenchies.
I now became the carrier of two mobile phones, much like the safari-suited businessmen and fixers for whom I have had nothing but unconcealed disdain. Thereafter followed a stream of nondescript phones including some Nokias and a brace of Sony Ericssons. Somewhere along the way my daughter gave up the security of the Pebble for the sleek lightness of the 6210. Monochrome screens gave way to coloured ones, and the shrill monotonic ring was replaced by polyphonic ones. Cameras were also incorporated into the phones. Probably the worst ever picture of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence was taken by me on a Sony Ericsson.
Apple introduced the iPhone and wanted you to lose the stylus in favour of your index finger. Believe it or not, the world agreed and was willing to pay many times what it cost to make the iPhone for the pleasure of wearing its index fingers thin. Somehow the good people at Apple managed to convince the general people that their phone was "smart" the way other ones weren't. Smart phones were born and they became all the rage. Suddenly Nokia was on a slippery slope and was headed rapidly downhill.
I couldn't afford the asking price for an iPhone and till date do not have one, save my son's hand-me-down for a brief while. When I had it, I hated the way it limited me to the Apple Ecosystem, thus setting up healthy annuities for Apple and a constant drain on my finances. So when an opportunity presented itself, I rid myself of the iPhone and hired an extra help at home with the money thus saved.
With more and more people flaunting smartphones I was developing an incurable case of screen envy.
A Samsung today needs half an acre of screen to do what my old XDA could do nine years ago with just 2.5 inches. My 6210 did not hang and did not have to be reset now and then. I didn't look like an idiot even with The Brick clamped to me years, the way I would with any of the so called "Phablets". But despite all that my smartphone envy has not dimmed; it has been growing undiminished. I finally decided to give in, even if it meant giving up the extra help at home. I zeroed in on a Windows smartphone, the Nokia 925.
That's when a termite army decided to chomp through half my kitchen.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.