The McBournie Minute: Escaping you people just got harder for me

If you read this blog or follow me on Twitter, you probably know about my intense hatred for Apple products. It may not be the products so much as it is the people who swoon every time Steve Jobs opens his mouth.

I really began to hate Apple back in college, when the iPod was just getting off the ground. I regularly had to use iMacs for my journalism classes, as well as laying out the student newspaper. (Yes, kids, I really was involved in club activities in college. In this case, I was an editor and got paid peanuts for my hard work. It was a sign of things to come.) The iMacs were a bit tricky to figure out when I first started using them, but I’m pretty good at learning new systems, but I would be working on a page, and several times a day, the application would crash. Seldom had I so intensely hated an inanimate object, well, sober anyway.

But now there’s a new reason for me to be wary of anything that has a lowercase “I” at the beginning of its name: melting iPods want to ruin your commute.

It’s true! Last week a crowded, and I mean crowded, train in Tokyo was delayed because of a burning smell. The source of the smell was an overheating iPod. Apparently these things are overheating and in some cases burning people left and right over there–and the Japanese are supposed to be tech-savy.

You may also have heard recently that my cell phone had broken (not because of overheating) and had begun trying to send text messages consisting of nothing but smiley faces to my contacts. As backup, I have been using my old cell phone, one of those clam shell-style phones we now only see in movies from the mid-aughts. I affectionately dubbed it Old Creaky, because if you opened it up just a bit past its comfortable open position, it would creak. Technology is not supposed to creak.

Old Creaky, despite the age and creakiness, has been a very trusty lifeboat for my communications interests. So when I found out I qualified for a phone upgrade with Verizon Wireless, I had a choice. All my friends have smart phones, (FACT: I’m the only one of The Guys who has never owned an iPhone) and my company said they would pay for a data plan.

I am certainly not holding out for an iPhone, even though every week there’s a new rumor about it coming to Verizon, and Blackberries just aren’t fun, and they sound like another term for poop. So I took the plunge and went with a Motorola DROID 2.

Very soon, I will be so reachable and in communication because of my cool new phone that I will no longer be interested in your face-to-face conversation. Instead, during any potential pause in your speaking, I will not hesitate to pull out my phone and scan my favorite sites for information I will forget in less than five minutes. Yes, I will finally be like everyone else.