Dear iPhone, Where Did Our Love Go?

I don’t blame myself for falling in love with the iPhone. It was inevitable, really.

I too was a slave to Apple’s genius marketing, a pawn in the white-earbudded caste system. I bought into the illusion of Apple superiority, and even caught myself cursing PCs for being so square and utilitarian. I was pretty sure I would buy anything that had rounded corners and a shiny embossed Apple. Not anymore.

The day I bought my iPhone, Apple treated me like the most recent Goddess of the Universe. When I said I was ready to buy, the Apple woman clapped her hands and led me excitedly over to the registration computers so I could sign my bank account over to Steve Jobs’ estate forever.

“Okaaaaaaaay,” she said when I was done, giving me a creepy, twinkling smile. “Now. Do you want white!? Or black!?”

Black is such a pleb-phone color. I picked white.

She helped me sync it to Google mail, calendars and contacts, all through Google’s admittedly un-user-friendly exchange system. She showed me how to make ringtones in GarageBand. She cautioned me not to drop it, and she then upsold me the $70 insurance in case I did.

I was completely smitten with the phone. Never had a non-human made me so happy, and my productivity was at an all-time high.

Waiting at the doctors’ office or in city council meetings was no longer a boring chore – it was an opportunity to read the New York Times or answer e-mails or Tweet my every musing. I could tell it to call people or play certain songs by holding down its only button (the “home” button) and talking to it in a stern, loud, unaccented voice.

Life was beautiful. I would take it everywhere, and I was never lost, because Google Maps was always with me. I even started an impressive collection of pictures of funny license plates that I took while jogging.

I became completely dependent. I had to have my iPhone with me at all times, and I would get itchy and hot if I couldn’t look at it every three minutes or so. I was paranoid about losing or breaking it, so I did everything I was supposed to do: keeping it in a case, powering it down every few days and backing it up in iTunes on a near-neurotic basis.

Then the troubles began.

One day the phone began snapping into voice-control mode for no reason, unbeknownst to me, and then taking any incidental ambient sound as an order.

“Uhh…why did you call me like five times last night and then hang up repeatedly?” a friend asked me one day. Oh no.

I pressed the allegedly fix-all “Restore” button and waited. Nothing happened. I did it again. Still nothing. Worse still, it wouldn’t turn back on.

Terrified, I gently wrapped the phone in a t-shirt and drove it to the nearest Apple store.

When I got there, a wiry, acne-scarred Apple Genius asked me what happened. I explained my failed restoration attempt. He tinkered with it a bit and said there was a problem with the display, which had caused my home button to malfunction.

“We can replace that for you,” he said. “It should be fine after this.”

Overjoyed and with a good-as-new iPhone, I returned home and put that nasty episode behind me.

Then the real problems started. Besides snapping into voice control without due cause, the phone began taking pictures at will, leaving me with a catalog of photos of the inside of my back pocket.

It began calling random people from my address book, and playing randomly chosen songs through its speakers whenever it felt like it. During an intense conversation with a friend, it was “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve. At the dentist? “Rock the Casbah.”

The final straw was one day when I was making eyes at the cute barista guy while ordering a latte at my local coffee shop.

“Remember yogurt and batteries!” I heard my own voice chirping from the phone at full volume. It was a voice memo of mine from December.

I was reminded of the plot of a sci-fi thriller where a nice young couple buys a robot-child to fill their emotional void, only to realize soon after that it plans to kill them with a fondue fork in the middle of the night.

Back at the Genius bar, I had a slightly edgier, less apologetic tone this time.

“Ok, it’s crapping out,” I said. “This happened once before. Fix it please.”

“Uh, well did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?” the Genius said.

No, I thought to myself. My first response was to drive for 30 minutes to this plexiglass hell and deal with your condescension, rather than pressing a single button.

“Yeah, I did the restore thing, it didn’t do anything,” I said.

The Genius tried to restore it himself. Nothing. Then he pressed the power button and the home button simultaneously for 10 seconds, then released the top button, then held the home button for 10 more seconds.

“What was that?” I asked. The phone was no longer demanding things from us and looked like it had been given a sedative.

“Oh, I just put it in the second level of override,” he said. “That’s what we do when the restore doesn’t work.” Apparently the thing that separates Geniuses from regular people is 10 seconds of button-mashing. Why they won’t tell us this, I don’t know.

He tried another restore attempt and….nothing.

“Is there a third level?” I asked.

“Uh, no. We can just swap it out,” he said, retiring my old phone to a white cardboard coffin, ready to be beamed back to the mother ship.

Unwrapping my replacement phone, I asked him if he could help me set up my Google calendar, contacts and mail once again.

“Well I don’t actually know how to do that,” he said. “I don’t use Gmail, I use Apple Mail.”

Of course. Why would you use a streamlined, free program that you can access from anywhere when you could use a clunky proprietary software that’s tied to your computer?

I tried syncing it myself. When I hit “save,” the phone told me it didn’t work because it couldn’t access the server. I looked at the device with an all-new disgust. Why, without the mail, calendar and contacts, this is just a phone! A phone that calls people. Whoop-dee-doo.

“Any idea why this isn’t working?” I asked the Genius.

The genius gave me an irritated look as if to say, Look, I’m not really a genius. I’m just a community college drop-out who happens to like video games, and I got this job because I’m the manager’s weed hookup.

“Google’s not our program,” he said. “We’re not required to offer support for it.” Then he turned away and called the next person.

Oh, but how supportive you were back when my purchasing of your digital crack was contingent upon being able to sync with Google! How you trouble-shot with me till my every desire was met! How swiftly we abandon pledges of customer service when the customer can punish us not with decreased commissions, but only with vituperative blogging.

Sigh. I went home and e-mailed my friend Jonathan, who is a Genius in both the literal and Apple sense. With his help and that of three different tech forums, I fixed the sync problem myself.

The whole ordeal has left me disillusioned with the iCult. I’m still happy I have a smartphone and I still treasure it for what it does for me, but I’ve become so repulsed by its capricious attitude that I can’t quite revere it like I used to. I’m just waiting for the day it starts playing Beyonce while we’re recording in the radio booth so I can expose it for the fraud that it is.

And I have to say, those few days that I spent without the iPhone were a nice little “restore” for my own self. I checked my e-mail less often, read a physical newspaper and contemplated buying a wristwatch. It gave me hope that I can actually quit anytime I want to.

Until then, I recommend the Google Nexus One phone, which seems to do everything the iPhone does, but better. Or the Motorola Android, which comes with the added benefit of saying “DROID!” in a robot voice every time you turn it on.

Even if it does only come in black.