Steve Jobs to Customers: Eat Cake, Dumpkopfs!

Posted: June 25th, 2010 | Filed under: Culture, Personalities, Ruminations | No Comments »

As it turns out the iPhone 4 does do everything a customer could possibly want it to do.

With two exceptions:

1) It won’t scour the toilet in the bathroom when your cleaning service doesn’t show up.

2) Its reception — sketchy already with AT&T’s lack of enough towers and bandwidth — is further compromised when you hold the phone in a normal manner.

Since there came an avalanche of complaints about the latter from first day customers — Apple acolytes disinclined to utter a discouraging word — Mahatma Steve Jobs came out from his cave and pontificated.

To paraphrase The Holy One: “Get over it, dumbasses. Hold it differently.”

So much for the oldest adage in commerce, “The customer is always right.”

Seems the problem hasn’t a thing to do with a possible design flaw — the antennae is in the metal edge strip where 99% of users hold a cellphone. It’s the fault of customers who stayed up all night to be first in line to plunk down hundreds of dollars and be the first on their block with the latest of Jobs’ gadgets. They simply didn’t read the manual to learn how to properly hold the new smart phone.

And what a contemporary device it is. Tens of thousands of apps. It does everything. (Except scrub the tub.)

It does everything, that is, except connect speedily to its network.

Am I missing something here? Isn’t that the baseline?

Actually I’m an old school guy. I understand that smart phones are the future. The present actually. Pretty soon they’ll be able to safely drive your SUV, so you can text without worry while speeding down Shelbyville Road. But I’ll only have one when it’s the only type of cellphone available.

My current phone can send and receive calls. Period. (Okay, it has rudimentary texting capabilities, which I never use.) And that’s it. No internet. No email. No travel directions. No videos. No camera.

I bought this particular model because all the reviews said it had the best voice quality incoming and outgoing.

It wasn’t an easy purchase. When I hit the Verizon store, my trusty and helpful rep had never heard of the model. “Customers could care less about speaker quality.” She found one on a bottom shelf in the corner. The box was dusty. Literally.

I don’t have an innate dislike for cellphones. Except when people use them for any purpose when driving or at the dinner table or when I’m trying to talk with them face to face. You know, in person. I sit at a computer most of the day, so I don’t feel it necessary to have www access when I’m away from my desk.

Besides everybody else has one. So when I was at my daughter’s birthday party last night and wanted to know the draft status of UK’s Fab Five, several guys scurried to show they could connect the fastest.

As for my response to Steve Jobs: “Rotate on this, dude!”

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