All I Can Do Is Try…

I’m slightly saddened to say that this is the final installment of A Bowl of Stupid for a while.  I’ve run out of stuff to say.  If things crop up in my memory then I’ll write about them.  It has, however, been a nice 32 part series that lasted over about 9 months, so I’ve no complaints.

In today’s lesson I am going to tackle the phenomenon of a particular type of person.  That person goes by the title of “iFag”.  I have examples of three different types of “iFag” and what follows will be a description of all three, the letting off of one, the ribbing of a second and the third being pulled into tiny little chunks.

First off, I must start by giving the Urban Dictionary definition of an “iFag”.

1. Someone who thinks he is cool because he owns an Apple product, usually the iPhone or the iPod.

2. Someone who thinks he is cool because he bought a certain technology that very few people use, and thus, he feels like he is superior, although often it is because the technology is overpriced and/or useless.

Suspect number one – A Man of the Cloth.

One of the guys that we knew who was into Apple stuff was a Vicar (not a Priest, he was Protestant.  Protestants are never Priests).  He would ask our department for a bit of advice on things.  That’s fine.  He didn’t bang on about how wonderful they were, how they never broke, how Macs were far better.  No, sometimes he even told us how much things about them sucked.  It was refreshing.  You, Sir, have been let off this time.  And, you know, it’s fine to have an iPhone if you just want a phone.  And if the person with it realises that it is just a phone, and not the amazing machine that so many people seem to think it is.

Suspect number two – The stupid, plastic-breasted bint with no identity of her own.

This is something that I have noticed is rather universal about people who have Apple products.  It’s mostly those who got the iPhone shortly after it came out or just have to have the latest iCrap whenever something new comes out.  They all seem to have no discernable identity of their own, and they piece one together by doing things to themselves (breast implants) or buying objects which they believe gives them some kind of status.  When you piece them all together from their ramblings the image which is left in your head is one of something like a fridge with lots of things stuck to it, including a pair of silicone sacks on the front.  They are the sort of people who have obviously been brought up in rampant consumerism and can only validate themselves by purchasing expensive items and banging on about how much better they are than everyone else.  I find that last comment of mine a little scary because this woman was almost five years older than me, and I would have expected it to be me who was affected by consumerism.  Alas, it is probably impacted upon by upbringing.

This woman in particular was a great example of it.  Every time I went to her office she would leave, or deliberately put her iPhone down in front of me in a very obvious place so that I couldn’t miss it.  It was as though she wanted me to notice how “cool” she was, because she had an iPhone.  If I didn’t make a comment she’d play with it, obviously to prompt a response.  A response was never forthcoming.  And then in my new job, people do call up to say “I was just using my iPad…” and they want some help with the product we provide support for.  If they’re so computer literate, why have they got an iPad?  I have to question whether they’re just calling us up to tell us they’ve got an iPad, or they haven’t got any friends because they’ve bought an iPad and want someone to talk to.  “I was just using my iPad…”

Just how shallow do you have to be to do that?  How lacking in any form of self-identity or interest do you have to be to try to force a conversation about a £500 piece of crap that doesn’t do half of the things that my Nokia N95 does?  It was proof that to this stupid woman the iPhone was not a useable piece of technology.  No, it was nothing more than an accessory to pose with.  It’s much the same as that baby which she is “desperately longing for” – it will be used as an accessory until she gets bored with it, or it starts becoming independent.

She used to want to ‘synchronise’ her calendar with her computer in the office.  It was funny – on an iPhone, that only worked with…Microsoft Exchange.  Oh the fucking irony.  One day she said that she wanted to connect the phone to the PC but when she tried she couldn’t install iTunes.  The reason?  She’s not an administrator.  The other reason?  Folders named “iTunes” were banned on the network.  Hahahahahahaha!  Suck it up bitch.  She also once asked me why everytime she connected the iPhone to a machine with iTunes it wanted to do a software update, and if I could change something to stop it.  “No, I can’t.  Apple are an unethical and dirty company.  I’m not going to soil myself by touching or using any of their products” came my reply.  She tried a few times after that to bring up her iPhone or iTunes and I would either ignore her, or cut her off mid-flow and reiterate my point about iPhones being for losers.

As I found out more about the iPhone I realised just how much those £500 heaps of crap were only for posing.  Some of the things that you can’t do on them is truly diabolical.

• No copy and paste
• No flash in the web browser (WTF?  My N95 supports Flash!)
• Cannot be used as a mounted volume (My N95 works just like a flash drive)
• Bluetooth?  Fugeddaboutit.  The headset’s for calls only, not even music.
• The iPhone does not have any expansion slots
• You can only install stuff from iTunes
• You can’t replace the battery
• You can’t send MMS
• No flash on the camera
• External keyboard?  I don’t think so!
• Multi-tasking?  No…not this time.  Not on the iPad either!
• You can only get ringtones from the iTunes store, you can’t use your own MP3s.

There’s so much stuff there that my N95, or hell even my previous phone the Nokia 6230 could and can still do which the iPhone can’t.  Why would you want to haul around a £500 piece of crap the size of your head when it can’t do some of the most simple functions you could imagine in modern technology?  Oh yeah, that’s right!  It’s because you’re posturing, because you’re a poser, and you have no discernable identity so you need people to think that you’re “cool” by having that ugly brick attached to the side of your head.  Whatever happened to having some meaning in your life through your actions, and not through your wallet?

Suspect number three – The Complete and Utter iFag Cunt-tard

I’ve mentioned this guy a number of times before.  He’s a fuck-tard.  Dickhead, bell-end, cocksucker, cock juggling thunder-cunt.  He’s the cunt that forced me out of my job and home, so naturally I love the guy.  He felt the need to force three people out of one department because we weren’t rape-sodomising all of the Apple hardware in the world, like he does.  We didn’t feel the need for our technology to be tactile to a point where we’d rather stroke the touch-sensitive screen of an iPhone than say, a cute puppy, or where we’d substitute our normal romantic-sexual relationships for the touch of a Mac.

So while I’m looking at something like this:

In all truth this is probably the closest he’s been to a woman, so he’s probably doing the following to his MacBook:

I hate this guy so much that I could post his name, address, workplace, telephone number, links to all of his own domains, blog, Flickr account and Twitter feed.  I won’t, because I have morals and ethics.  This is a guy who teaches vulnerable children about how to be safe online.  Yeah…he has put his entire identity online.  Even on his Twitter feed are the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the building in which he lives.  That’s so safe guys!  Yeah, tell the whole fucking world, via the safe, Pedo-Bear approved medium of Twitter, not only what a loser you are, but also EXACTLY WHERE YOU LIVE!!!!!11!!!!!1!!1!

His Twitter feed would bang the fuck on about AppleTV.  What’s the point of Apple TV?  Why would I want to pay $250 for something that I can watch on my computer for free from YouTube or Flickr?  “Oh, it’s so that it can be in HD on your TV!!!!11!1!”  But I can just run an HDMI lead from my PC to the TV.  Why would I want to use iTunes for my TV series?  Seriously, why?  One day I was just browsing online and I saw something pop up the said “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit £45 on iTunes”.  My eyes virtually fell out of my head.  I looked up the very same series on Amazon and it ran at about £20 for the physical DVDs posted to you.  Why would anyone want to use iTunes to get TV shows?

Being the ever sensible gentleman that he was, he sequestered 1% of the organisation’s IT budget in order to buy HIMSELF an Apple Macbook.  That’s nice, huh?  It’s not like we could have spent that money elsewhere.  No, a second-hand refurbished laptop that didn’t do half the stuff that a £250 Asus netbook can do is always a great way to spend 1% of any budget belonging to anyone.  Awesomesauce.

On a sidenote, when he told us he was getting his own internet connection the first thing he said was “It’s not for porn!”.  Yeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah…right, sure it’s not.  That’s the first thing you said – of course it’s for porn.

It was quite obvious that this guy swapped meaningful real-life relationships for Twitter conversations on his iPhone with people he had never met.  By the time I left he was spending half his days updating his Twitter feed and twattering with his little friends about how wonderful Apple was.  I swear, he probably had multiple-Macgasms every day.

It’s that kind of bullshit, that kind of brand worship that makes me sick.  It makes me so angry that people are that shallow.  If you don’t have an iPhone, to some of these people you aren’t worth bothering with.  They’ve got to force that Apple crap on you, and you’ll only be accepted into their fold once you’ve paid out stupid amounts of money for something that doesn’t do a tiny proportion of what every other bit of technology on the planet does, but because it’s “Oooh!  Shiny!!” you “can’t live without it!”.

Get over yourselves.  Mac products don’t “just work”.  They aren’t “fully functional”.  They aren’t “extremely powerful”.  They can do a limited number of things, far less than a machine running Windows or a flavour of UNIX, but because they do them in a childish and brightly coloured way you think they’re better.  I’m guessing people like that iFag mentioned above never got beyond the primary colours and simple shapes books at school.  You’re only really into technology when you build your own machines (with swappable parts, not the fixed things like Apple!) and write your own software to solve problems.  I’m yet to meet an iFag who has even seen the inside of a computer, let alone can write any form of software.  And, don’t forget…you have to hold Apple products in the right way or they don’t work.  So fuck all of you left-handers.  How dare you do the first thing that’s natural to you?  No, you’re a slave to Apple!  You must use your right hand ONLY when using Apple products.

Purlease, left handers are people too.  I should know, I’m married to one and he actually gets laid, unlike all of those Apple lovers.