How much you love your Smart Phone?

I was travelling to a far away city by train. There was this bunch of jolly good fellas, all teenagers, pulling pranks on themselves and guffawing at regular interval right through the journey. I followed their antics for a while, lost interest, and started reading some book I carried with me only to be pulled back into their world by a sudden commotion.

They were running around the carriage, shifting through other passenger's bags frantically and searching for something...

One of them, a lean fella with a puffed up face, sat down next to me with his head buried in his hands. Anguish was written large on his face.

I asked him what happened and he just blurted out, 'I LOST my uber costly smart phone and my parents will kill me'!. The crowd around us galvanised at once on hearing this and I could see lot of bent creatures searching for the phone at impossible places in the carriage. 

I could also see that tension was bubbling up within him with each passing minute.

His friends kept calling his number but the ring tone was not audible enough amidst the din. Soon the train started slowing down to make a stop and then one of his friends shouted, 'I hear it'!. The whole carriage breathed a sigh of relief and started chatting about how hurting it would be for a student to lose a very costly smart phone.

I bought my first cell phone (note the word 'bought'), Nokia 321, when I went abroad to work. 

Nokia kept changing the numbers and I kept flipping my phones to catch up (4 series, 5 series, 6 series and so on). I occasionally bought some flip phones, flop phones (the Sony pre-Experiea ones!) and was generally moving along with the curve of innovation spending my hard earned money. Then Apple came out with iPhone. The moment I read its specs I realised that Apple had let the genie out of the bottle by bringing out its full blown operating system meant for PCs onto its mobile phones and that the phones and PCs would merge sooner or later in terms of capabilities. I also realised that the world would never be the same but sadly I failed to capitalise on this (I did not buy a single share of Apple though I could have, what a shame eh?).

Cell phones became incredibly cool and Apple started ruling the world. Data usage was not that high in those days though and hence soon after I came back to India for good, I switched back to a simple Nokia C series phone and was quite content with it, using it only for making calls. Then a friend of mine gifted me an iPhone. My world changed again and am spending more and more time with it as the days go...

Still, what bothers me is the trend that almost all guys and girls right from the age of 14/15 now want and have the latest smart phones, not necessarily an Apple iPhone as it is priced in the stratosphere. Most of them lose their phones / damage them unintentionally and end up at the receiving end of their parents' wrath as it really hurts seeing a couple of grands going down the drain at least for the parents. Civil and Criminal issues involving smart phones are ever rising but the phones are selling like hot cakes.

All these musings bring me to the most important question; how much you love your smart phone?

This kid I am about to introduce would beat you hands down :-)

A teenager in a quiet village in Germany dropped his phone accidentally in a pond from his boat while fishing and tried to retrieve it by attempting to dive in (he was apparently a licensed diver). The fishing club refused permission and sent him back. He was obviously pissed off and sneaked back hours later with a master plan. He started draining the pond using two pumps to suck the water out so that he could get his phone back! 

He connected the hoses to a toilet thinking that the toilet was on a drainage grid and water would easily flow out through the underground grid but the toilet was not! The parking lot in the fish club received, well, a pond load of water courtesy this fella!!!! 

The club called the police and he was asked to pay up for all the damages caused by his action though he could not retrieve his phone!