Natalia Antonova

One of the things that annoys me each and every holiday season is the amount of entitled whining that goes on after the kids open their presents and decide that the color of the gadget that mommy and daddy bought them this time clashes with the color of the sports car mommy and daddy bought them last time.

Wrong color iPhone! A car but no iPad! A Camaro AND an iPad - but Christmas still sucks!

Whip the ungrateful little monsters and send them to work in a Victorian factory. What’s that? Child labor laws? Well, crap.

Russians traditionally give each other presents on New Year’s, which means that the holiday shopping season is still in full swing around here - and it drives me up the wall, particularly because sales clerks are under pressure to sell gadgets, and to exploit consumer ignorance in order to get people to spend more money.

Just consider the iPad, for example. It’s sleek and shiny and convenient. Unless you’re a person like me, someone who spends most of her days - when she’s not tending to the whims of husband and baby, that is - furiously typing. I’m sorry, but I cannot type furiously on an iPad. It just  wasn’t designed with me in mind.

And yet here is an actual conversation I had with a guy at an electronics store over the weekend:

Guy: “Maybe what you REALLY want for New Year’s is an iPad.”
Me: “Hm. Well, it’s nice, but it’s a poor investment for me at this time, because I write a lot, and I don’t find them that convenient for writing - you know? I’ve tried them out, the technology doesn’t suit me. I guess if I was a more visual person, then...”
Guy: [Interrupting] “Everyone finds the iPad convenient for writing! WHAT are you talking about?”
Me: *protracted sigh*

Obviously, iPad apps are great for someone who spends a lot of time reading newspapers - like I do. But one has to do a cost-benefit analysis regardless - and as such, the iPad is still too big a luxury for my household at this time. The consumer ethos that says that one must buy expensive gadgets because, to quote Mr. Sales Guy, everyone else is getting one as well is not only wasteful - it is stupid.

I get that talk of austerity this holiday season automatically gives people hives - since “austerity” in government-speak means “depriving people of much-needed benefits in favor of the banks.” But a little personal austerity never hurts - who knows, one might even give one’s children the right example, and not have them turn out to be totally horrible human beings.

I *am* told that touch typing on the iPad can be made easier by stuff such as TouchFire - which has enjoyed huge success on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform. The makers of TouchFire have run through their entire first production order and people now reserving the TouchFire keyboard will now be waiting until... uh... February? Or March?

Either way, it would probably suck trying to get it shipped to Russia.

And anyway, the TouchFire website currently features a guy in a stupid hipster hat.

I hate stupid hipster hats even more than I hate pushy sales clerks and spoiled children.

So there.