Dual wielding
She was cute.
Maybe too cute. When I leaned over to talk to her, I wouldn’t have been offended to hear another passenger mumble, “She’s out of your league, pal.”
But this wasn’t that sort of opening line. The girl sitting across from me on the train had a Samsung Galaxy S (something something, I don’t know/care about the specific model) laying in her lap, while her hands were wrapped around an iPod touch and Apple’s iconic white ear buds dangled from her ears.
I leaned across, smiled and pointed at her iPod. She took out the ear buds and I asked, in the least werido way possible, why she had an iPod and an Android smartphone.
She was blunt. “My boyfriend said this was better than an iPhone, so he bought it. Two weeks later I went and bought an iPod touch.”
Mercifully she didn’t mace me, and was quite open to talking. She showed me her iPod: it was a fourth-generation with six pages of apps and 15 GBs of music. A lot of the apps were garbage free stuff, but she had a solid collection of premium games. Apparently I had interrupted a Plants vs. Zombies shesh.
In contrast, her Android phone was barren. Nothing downloaded but the Facebook app. I asked her why and she shrugged. “Couldn’t really figure it out. Nothing happened when I plugged it into my computer.”
So this is what things had come to for her: carrying around two incredibly powerful, modern devices; each with their own distinct ecosystems and user experiences. And she had decided to focus on the one marketed to children.
I explained to her that she could do basically everything on her phone that she was doing on her iPod touch and only carry around one device. It was just … different.
Her response was unapologetic. “No, I can’t. I have to get my boyfriend to do things on my phone.” She waved her iPod in the air. ”I can do things on this myself.”
She was cute.
What an asshole boyfriend.
