Nano Note: My New iPad
Immediately it was clear: the iPad is everything that I expected it to be. I worry about eating these words down the road not because I fear that the device will surprise me with disappointments — I’m oddly but definitely sure that it won’t — but because I know that I can’t yet grasp the unintended uses to which I’ll subject it. This is where dotage plays to my advantage. Happy as a clam that the iPad does precisely what I want it to do, I’m too old and lazy to ask it to do anything else. But we shall see.
Rather than extol the merits of the iPad, however, I’d like to tell you how I came to possess one this very day. And yet I’d also like to get to bed reasonably soon. Pesky!
As noted earlier, we celebrated Kathleen’s birthday yesterday, and I was pretty useless this morning. This morning and well into the afternoon, I was an Ibsen monologue. Maybe Strindberg. Needing a boost, I checked out the tracking report on the iPad that I ordered last week. My God! It was already delivered, downstairs, to the package room. Better than sex!
What to say? Jason Mei, my tech god, and I have worked out a workable routine. When I need something — be it a flash drive or a new computer — Jason sends me a link to a vendor site. I buy what I’m supposed to buy, and, when it arrives, I let Jason know that it’s here, and he comes to hook it up. As soon as I brought up the box from the package room, this afternoon, I dashed off a note to Jason, telling him that the iPad had arrived a day early. No problem! He’d be up after five.
The horrible embarrassing part that we will pass over as quickly as possible has me going da-DA over what turned out to be the iPad dock. No, I didn’t open the shipping box until Jason got here. (I never do.) Yes, I’d bought a dock as well as the iPad, a keyboard dock. I’d agonized. The plain-vanilla dock cost $30, the keyboard dock fifty dollars more. I’d plumped. And now I had it: my wonderful iPad keyboard dock. Useless, utterly useless, without an actual iPad. Which according to the tracking info, hadn’t even been fabricated.
If you can imagine how stupid I felt, having asked Jason to come uptown to set up my idiot-friendly reading device, please put it into a 500-word essay. $50 to the most excruciated entry. Obligatory first sentence: “So there I was, with my fabulous iPad dock…” Feel free to work in the sequel: calls were made; Internet sites were scoped. The upshot was one of the more improbable shopping expeditions in Gotham lore, as Jason and I pegged up 86th Street to Best Buy, where, at a rather sordid little back-room counter, we found that only 32 and 64-GB iPads were for sale. Jason had assured me that 16-GB would be more than enough, so I felt like chump buying the 32. Better than 64, though. You do what you can.
But you never know. Maybe, this time next year, I’ll be in App Store rehab.