It just barely remained the dinner hour and I was making my way to the Apple Store to get my laptop fixed. It wouldn’t boot anymore, just made a bunch of whirring noises when I held down the power button, like there were unseen foley artists doing their best to approximate the sound of mechanical failure. The Apple Store’s on the top floor, past the food court whose ceiling once held a mural of a bright blue sky that looked as though it had been drawn with colored pencils. A while ago they renovated the place and the mural was replaced with an interleaving of steel and wood, which looks as modern and elegant as any cosmopolitan suburban shopper could wish for — but I still miss the sky.
There was an immense line of people outside the store. I had heard the iPhone had come out this week, but that must have been several days ago — everyone who wanted to wait in line must have had their wish granted by now, right? I asked an employee in a bright blue t-shirt if I could go in, since I was just there for repairs, don’t have the kind of cash for an iPhone. He said with a wry smile that it was fine, but I couldn’t help but ask — “What are all these people waiting for?”
There was a man leaving the store who had just bought one. He had graying hair, smart-looking eyeglasses, and a little boy in tow so I immediately thought of him as one of those types of fathers that only exist for other people, not yourself. He smiled at me, more than happy to enlighten and show off his new toy — swiped across its surface to unlock and held the phone to my ear.
“March ninth, two thousand and nine,” a beautiful disinterested female voice told me.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
The man told me that it was the date that you’d find your true love. His son put in, “No, it’s when you die,” though the father hushed him immediately. Somebody else in line said the date was the one day where everything you tried would succeed, and somebody else disagreed and said it was the opposite, you should stay inside with the pillow over your head that day if you wanted to have any hope of keeping your life intact, and someone else said you would be told a great secret that day but you would miss it if you weren’t paying close attention to everything you overheard, and on and on.
I didn’t want to be part of the discussion anymore, was more than a little unhappy I had raised the question at all. As I walked into the store, the line shifted uneasily, as if the people were not quite ready to purchase.
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Tagged commerce, suburbia
