The Visa Diaries

I don’t know about you folks, but I have an iPhone. I’m guessing a good number of you do too – Apple didn’t recently beat out Microsoft in market cap for its computers (crazy as that is, and not that the computers aren’t great), ok?? Looove the iPhone.

However, if you don’t have an iPhone, this is not some kind of insider, iPhone-crazy post designed to make you feel bad. Because the iPhone has an weak spot, as I have discovered, and its name is Liquid.

my third iPhone

I first had an iPhone 3g. It served me wonderfully, and I loved it dearly, until about 2 months ago when I went to get Mongolian barbecue for lunch. Looove the Mongolian barbecue. I eat it regularly, as its one of the few good lunch options near my work. However, on this particular day, I must have been making a call, must have picked up my Mongolian barbecue, and tossed the phone into the smiley-faced lunch bag when I was done… Well, when I removed the phone back at my desk, my own face was not so smiley. iPhone did not seem to be working properly. Sure, Mongolian BBQ juice had goozled onto it a bit, but hey, like, what’s the big deal?

Turns out it is a BIG deal. When Mr. Genius at the iPhone bar the next day opened up the phone, he drew for me with his finger the outline of the Mongolian BBQ juice inside the phone… Big goozle. iPhone no work-y. Darn.

Luckily however, I was due for an upgrade. It still cost me $200, but I walked away with a brand new iPhone 3gs. Happy-ish camper.

Until the other weekend. It has been incredibly hot on the East Coast for the past several weeks, and Saturday afternoon there was a glorious downpour. I happened to be caught out in it on my bike and was thinking, oh how wonderful, oh how glorious, the big, deep, raging summer rain. I peddled fast through the drops till I got home. And when I got home… big deep summer drops had permeated my purse, and apparently, permeated my new iPhone. This time my reaction was a lot more than “darn.” Two iPhones in two months is a bit much.

Let me just stop here and say that if this ever happens to you, drop that baby in a bag of rice as fast as you can say “Uncle Ben.” Apparently the rice helps dry it out. I didn’t know that, so I just propped it up, hoping the rain would drip out of it. No such luck. Over the next day it progressed from dying to dead.

I took it to the Genius Bar again. I got a very nice genius, at the VERY crowded Fifth Avenue store (I think the Apple store must be one of New York’s biggest tourist destinations.) I told him what had happened, and he said, “You know that liquid voids the warranty?” I had suspected as much. He peered into its orifices with a bright light. He tried to restart it with mega-voltages. It remained in the next world. He peered into its orifices with the bright light again, and then looked at me furtively. Apparently the iPhone has built in liquid detectors – two of them. On my phone, one was tripped and the other one wasn’t. Company policy he told me, is that if one is tripped, they ask the customer, “has this phone gotten wet?” If the customer says yes, warranty is voided. If the customer says no, it is covered by warranty. He kindly suggested I take that info with me, and make another appointment, at another Genius Bar. I skedaddled away, carefully holding my phone upright, lest the water drip around inside and trip the second sensor.

Next morning, I had an appointment at the Soho Genius Bar, bright and early. I got a kindly looking genius, and was somewhat encouraged that perhaps he’d “work with me”. He took the phone into the back for what seemed a very long time. Finally when he reappeared, he said, “This phone has been wet.” No ifs, ands or buts. No one-sensor-has-been-wet-but-the-other-hasn’t. I tried to prompt him. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Is that really the case, that if one sensor is wet, the warranty is voided?” He wasn’t budging. I could try AT&T he told me. I could make another appointment with another Genius, he told me. But he wasn’t budging. I left disheartened, cradling my dead phone.

One way or another, I needed a working phone. After trying AT&T, who fobbed me off on the Cellphone Exchange re-sellers down the street, where sketchy guys were selling “extra” Blackberries and iPhones, and they wanted $345 for a used iPhone anyway, I realized that Apple’s $200 replacement fee was the best deal I was going to get.

I made another appointment at the Genius Bar, back at Fifth Ave again. When I got there after work, it was crowded again. “We’re running 20 minutes late,” the greeter told me. I sat down dejected and nervous, carrying my dead phone, feeling tired of this whole pursuit of a free replacement. Half an hour went by, and I tried to distract myself, unsure of my communications strategy should be. To maintain the pretense that it hadn’t gotten wet, it had just dies, I reasoned I should act clueless as to what the problem could be, indignant that this new phone had broken, and confident that they they would replace it. However, I finally got called by a very no-nonsense-looking female Genius. “Oh great,” I thought, “She’s never going to give me a break.” All of my will for this issue gone, I communicated the my phone had stopped working in as nervous and guilty a tone as could be.

But she was busy. She didn’t even ask me what happened. She peered quickly in the phone’s orifices. Then she did something amazing: she walked to a drawer, pulled out a replacement phone box, opened it, scanned it, replaced my SIM card, printed out some paperwork, and handed me a new phone. “Your phone got wet,” she said. “I’m giving you a replacement one for free today. Be very careful with it – these phones are very sensitive to water.”

I don’t know why she did it – maybe just to get me out of there? – but I was grateful. And I am now going to travel with a ziplock baggie for my iPhone.

Early on when Matt and I first started dating, apropos of very little, he announced to me that he had a great blender. He really emphatically wanted me to know what good quality his blender was, and went on about it at some length. This did not exactly make my knees go weak. “I’ve got a good blender, too” I said, referring to a cobalt-blue KitchenAid that had been my first grown-up home appliance purchase when I graduated from college. He looked at it, and was a bit dismissive, “Yeah, that looks ok. But I’ve got a really great blender.” I think the conversation must have ended about there, because I could not muster any more interest for the topic.

From that exchange until last weekend, I maintained the impression that my sweetie was a little weird and overzealous on the topic of blenders (actually kitchen stuff in general, but I can leave that for another post). It didn’t stop me from loving him or agreeing to marry him, but it did get filed away in that mental drawer where we all keep of secret judgements about the strange little quirks of others.

His error in strategy, I now realize, was announcing his blender asset in the middle of winter, when there wasn’t so much of interest to blend. Last weekend however, when he suggested that we could make frozen strawberry margaritas in his excellent blender, all of a sudden my attention for his appliance skyrocketed. “Frozen strawberry magaritas!!!” I thought, “I’ve never heard of such a genius idea!”

We went to the supermarket and got the ingredients: a big bag of frozen strawberries, a can of Limeaid, and a bottle of Jose Cuervo’s medecino. (We discovered while enjoying his elixir, that Jose Cuervo’s name in English would translate to “Joe Crow”… somehow not as flattering). That’s it: toss these things in the blender with some ice, and fire that baby up. This, then, is where the great blender becomes relevant. If you have one, such as Matt’s Hamilton Beach, after a few minutes all those icy ingredients will smooth out into one fine, slushy, slurpy, heavenly strawberry slurry. If your blender is not quite so great, well, after a few minutes you may have nothing more than some pathetically chipped frozen chunks and that unmistakable eau de motor burn-out. I’m sure you’ll agree that chunky, unblended summer drinks are just about as much of a buzz-kill as sunburn and sand in the bikini.

So that’s it – my purchase this week was summertime joy in a glass. All it took was three simple ingredients, and a guy with a great blender.

I realize there is more to say about a camera purchase, so I’m going to linger on this one a little longer. That thing I want to say, is what is up with the group shot of people out partying? Ok, this is just a starting point, but to clarify, I am talking about the type of photo that litters sites like mySpace and FaceBook, of ensembles of young, dressed-up, wasted people, out and about the town, suction-cupped to each other like they are the last living beings on earth and wearing smiles meant for tooth-whitening commercials.

I think these photos are a bid to say that their subjects exist. They are a form of evidence, a plaintive “I was here” in a our media-saturated, media-validated culture, where nothing is real until its on tv or in print. I mean, being young with money isn’t enough anymore, heiresses have to hire PR firms to make them famous for being young with money, for god’s sake. And how many stars are more famous for their “real” life dramas played out in tabloids than for any film or music career they might have. Is it any wonder then that Joe and Jane Schmoe want to get in on the action? Short of having real paparazzi on one’s tail, the next best thing is to whip out the pocket digi at every turn and document it oneself.

The thing about these pictures is that the evening, the friendship, the emotion – all of it – might as well exist in order to take that picture. The snapshot is not merely a document of something that was real and was happening anyway – the snapshot is a crystallization of what we wish was real, a coming together of all the “I am a joyous young party thing” that we could muster, but we muster it for the camera, because that is the evidence that will remain.

Ryan McGinley, one of my favorite photographers, who specializes in seemingly off-hand photos of exquisite debauchery, has said, “A lot of people look at my work and assume it is all just an autobiography and that my life is as wild and fun as the images I take. I like that assumption but it’s not true. My photographs are really closer to a documentation of my fantasy life. People still take photographs as truth. They look at them and think what they see really happened and while it did really happen, it didn’t really happen like that. It is more like pseudo-fiction because it did happen but it might not have happened if it weren’t going to become a photograph.”

What McGinley said could equally apply to any image we see in a fashion magazine, or frankly most of the photos we see. What does that mean, when we are trying to model our lives on images that are not really representative of real lives?

I’m rather ambivalent about cameras for this reason. More often than not these days, I can’t be bothered to take at events pictures and the camera stays in my purse. But I do have my share of above mentioned party-pics from over the years. The irony is that I totally enjoy looking back over my old party snaps, and reminiscing about how fabulous it all must have been. Once the memories of the complexity have faded and all that remains is the smiley surface, it looks pretty damn good. Maybe that is a blessing.

I call my doorman “Santa Claus.” His real name is Dave, but he is a friendly, portly fellow, and, more to the point, he gives me lots of packages. Ones that I have ordered and paid for, fair enough, and that have been brought by the postman, been too big to wedge into my pigeon-hole mail box, and so been left with Dave to hand on to me when I get in. But despite the fact that all Dave does is go to the closet and hand them over, he gets all the emotional benefit as if he had painstakingly chosen and procured them, specially thinking about my wants and tastes. They seem all the more like special “gifts” because they generally arrive a week or so after having been ordered, and thus I always have a moment of wondering “now what could this be??” which is of coarse the fun part about presents.

Since I don’t have much time for shopping, and also don’t have a car, Dave has been the bestower of the majority of my new things recently. A lot of them have been books. A big, exciting one the other week was a vacuum cleaner. And just yesterday, Dave gave me a new camera. Now that was a fun package to open.

I got the Canon Powershot SD800 IS, which if you are like me, means very little. I find it actually incredibly confusing that they have so many models and numbers, especially when they explain all the model numbers with more numbers: numbers of megapixels, numbers of focal length, numbers of shutter speed, etc etc. I usually go to Cnet, read the reviews, and then find myself even more dismayed, because many of the cameras seem rather good, but all of their flaws are also picked out. How am I to know if it will matter to me that this model does not have a manual shutter speed adjustment? How much is that worth to me, in terms of extra cost and perhaps a tradeoff for a bigger size or a different brand? Its enough to make the head spin.

So usually, my MO would be to get good-enough technical specs and then go on style. My camera of choice in that scenario would have been the Sony Cybershot – much most stylish than the Canon, I’d say. But this time I was a bit more responsible. I polled everybody in my class who has one of these small digital point-and-shoots, and the general consensus was that the Canon takes the best picture quality. So I let practicality override my style-slave, and ordered the Canon (I was going to get the Sony in white as well, so it would have had that whole cool iPod look going. sigh…)

Anyway, it remains to be seen how this practical decision will work out. Not that the Canon is hideously ugly, it just doesn’t have that extra stylistic je ne sais quoi. Will I regret it every time I use it? Will I have that internal sigh that wishes I was whipping out the Sony instead? Or will the glory of the picture quality make it all ok? In the battle between style and substance, I tend to want both. So I sit on the fence and get skewered. I’ll have to get back to y’all about how this decision works out for me.