They’re lined up all over the country, hunkered down in their folding watch-the-kids-at-T-ball chairs. In my town, they’re bundled up in Bears jackets and hats. Some are even wearing gloves. While they don’t quite qualify to be committed to the local mental health center, everyone passing by them wonders, “Are they crazy?”
I see them, amazed by their dedication and devotion and I think, “Wow, there really ought to be a name for people like that. How about, say, ‘losers’?”
And what are they waiting for? The iPhone 5. Now, I love Apple products. In our house, we have an iMac, two MacBook Pros and two MacBooks. We have an iPod Classic, two iPod Touches and, yes, an iPhone. I love Apple products because they work and they’re backed by great service. Don’t get on my back about PCs. Been down that road and I’m never going back. You can if you want to and I won’t care at all. Besides, this isn’t a post about who makes better computers or phones or MP3 devices.
This is a post about people obsessed with stuff. People so obsessed with stuff that they are willing to sit in line for stuff so they can say they were the first to have the stuff. Frankly, I don’t understand why there is more than one person in any of these lines. If you’re not the first person in line, why bother? You’ll be the second person to get the iPhone 5. Where’s the glory in that? I imagine the water cooler conversation going something like this:
Julie: Hey, Joe! I see you’ve got the new iPhone 5.
Joe: Yeah, Julie. Sat in line for four days for this little beauty.
Julie: Wow! So you were the first person in Naperville to get an iPhone 5?
Joe: Actually, no, I was second. So, kind of the silver medal in iPhones.
Julie (backing away): Yeah, well, good for you, Joe. Bet you can’t wait to show it to the guys in your RPG meetup.
The thing that really puzzles me about the losers people waiting for the iPhone 5 are the diametrically opposed concepts involved in waiting days to buy an iPhone 5. iPhones are expensive, $199 without anything else, such as the talk, text and data package you also need. So, you probably want to be employed for that to work out. Most of the people I know who are employed don’t have days to sit on their ass in a folding chair at the Apple Store. So, in my mind a bunch of unemployed nerds are sitting in front of a store so they can be the first to buy a product they can’t afford.
The iPhone losers buyers are up there, in my mind, with the people who get up at three o’clock in the morning so they can be the first in line when the big box stores open at 5 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving. Why? So they can get incredible deals on stuff, stuff for Christmas, the Stuffapalooza of Stuff.
People have been shopping for stuff the day after Christmas since the three Kings hopped on their camels and hoofed it back to the Orient. And yet, my local news always reports on people shopping for stuff on the day after Christmas as if it were the Second Coming. My favorite part of the news reports is the interview with the happy, exhausted shopper, who brags about saving $500 on a $1500 flat-screen TV.
No, Ma’am you didn’t save $500. You didn’t save any money at all. You spent $1500.
Maybe I’m sensitive to the stuff obsession because one of my favorite activities during a bipolar mania was shopping. I racked up a mountain of debt while I was high. Every one of my personal Black Fridays was followed by depression, made even blacker by the aftermath of my manic episode.
Anyone who says we are no longer a hunter-gatherer society hasn’t taken a good look around. The people featured on “Hoarders” are only the most extreme of us. Evidence of our hunting and gathering is everywhere. A two-car garage isn’t enough anymore. Now we need three—one for each of our cars and a third for stuff. Toy boxes can no longer contain our kids’ stuff; now we need entire rooms. We have so much stuff that we have entire stores devoted to containing our stuff.
Recently, we sold the home I grew up in. While it was emotionally wrenching, I expected that. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming magnitude of stuff. Faced with getting rid of an entire life’s worth, I realized how truly insidious stuff is. It slinks into our lives one shopping bag or birthday or Christmas at a time. We suck it into our existence, shoving other stuff aside to fit it all in, then go about slowly accumulating more and more stuff.
This time tomorrow, losers people all over the world will call themselves winners in the “Who Got the iPhone First” game. Good for them, I guess. But me? There is nothing in the world that I want so much that I’ll sit on my butt in front of a store for days on end. Now, if you just happened to pick up an extra one . . .
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