So following the clearout of the DAB radio and a few other bits and bobs on ebay, the gadget monster retreated in to his cave and fell in to a deep sleep. Leaving me to work through my cheapo Photoreading course bought from the ‘bay for a fraction of the $600 plus taxes that it costs to import it from the US of A.
Until one of the Engineers at work showed me her latest phone. She nearly bumped in to me in the corridor at work as she was busy typing on her phone.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“Ahh you see I’m talking to my friend on messenger.” She said.
I was puzzled - messenger has been banned at work, as has personal email and blogs, leaving me completely isolated from the rest of the world between 9am and 4.30 pm on workdays. Sure I should be busy working but if they expected me to work solidly all day then they would have to pay me more. A lot more.
“Messenger? You can get messenger on a phone?”
“Yes, and with this lovely T-Mobile PDA and their ‘Web N Walk’ package, I’m online all the time and it doesn’t cost me any more a month.”
“Oh”, I said. “I wished you hadn’t showed me that, for it is the equivalent of waving a bottle of black label Smirnoff at a recovering alcoholic”.
With that she laughed and walked off down the corridor, deep in textual conversation with someone out in the ether, leaving me wishing that I hadn’t left my office to get a coffee.
The MDA Vario II is a thing of beauty. Slide-out keyboard, Pocket PC, word, excel, email, websurfing, wifi, video calling and instant messenger all in one wondrously compact chassis.
All for a relatively inexpensive £27 a month.
And so I wake at night in cold sweats, the hunger has returned and I’m not sure how much longer I can fight it. The thought of being constantly online, able to blog, email and message wherever I am, for a fixed monthly fee, is almost too much to resist.
And I’m not sure how long I will last, but I will fight it with every ounce of effort that I can muster, trying to ignore that evil inner voice that even now, as I type, taunts me from deep inside my mind.
“Gaaaaaadget”
“Gaaaaaaaaadget”
For there is no killing of the gadget monster. He is an invincible spawn of primal ID that exists in all gadget freaks, often dormant for months at a time, yet awoken by the slightest sniff of novelty and completely uninterested in financial viability. When the gadget monster is hungry, he must be fed, less he begin to deactivate basic human functionality until all that remains is the basic reflex of breathing and being able to punch in your PIN code at Currys.
