Isn’t the just world fallacy fun? Blaster Master paid a bunch of money and is all super smart and stuff and so deserves superior quality. Everyone else, on the other hand, is inferior and has no right to complain about things not being up to basic standards. It can’t be that the world is unfair, no, Blaster Master must just be a superior person.
This shit pisses me the fuck off, and is a large part why I find it hard to care when I find out that certain Dopers don’t like me.
Oh, how I long for the telephones of my youth. In the 1960’s men were men, women were women, gays were gay and phones were phones—there was no ambiguity.
For one thing, there’s nothing quite as effective as terminating a hostile conversation with good slam with a hefty receiver to emphasize one’s displeasure. “…Stick this up your ass, pal!” [SLAM!!!] is infinately more decisive than, “stick this up your ass, pal!” [click].
There’s no good way to hold these infernal smart phones either. If you hold it, as seems to be the popular method, face-up in front of your lips, you can’t hear well and look like a precocious ass about to eat Pâté de Foie Gras on a Saltine cracker. And, holding it to your ear, like a real phone, comes with its own problems. A while back, on an important business phone-conference, I kept hearing an annoying, *“beep…beep…beep.” *Finally, I asked, “who’s making that beeping sound?”, only to be embarrassed to learn that it was my ear contacting a screen button causing the beeps.
We actually had freedom once upon a time, not tethered constantly to a phone. If you weren’t home, you couldn’t be bothered by calls. If you were home but didn’t want to be bothered, you just didn’t answer the phone. Then, when asked later why you couldn’t be reached, you simply said you weren’t home when they called. That’s a good, sincere lie that everyone used to use all the time. Today, with everyone expecting you to be available 24/7, you have to use some wimpy, insincere sounding excuse like, “sorry, my cell fell in the toilet yesterday and feces got jammed in the speaker hole.”
We didn’t have any of this speaker-phone crap, either. We’re now totally at the mercy of the other party as to whether or not our conversations are private. I thought I was having a private, intimate moment with my wife a few weeks ago, comprehensively detailing the rather dismaying findings from my recent protological examination. I was expecting to hear a soothing reply like, “oh, I’m sorry to hear that, sweety…but, don’t worry, I’ll insert and massage in the twice daily salve for you”, but shockingly, I instead hear group giggling and one of my wife’s wise-guy co-workers quip, “those things can prolapse all the way down to the floor if your not careful, Tibby”—yeah, to my extreme mortification, the wife had me on speaker phone at her office. That never would have happened back in the '60’s.
Phones used to be manly. They were big, black and heavy, just like my mistre…oh, never mind. Your index finger always stayed in good shape, exercising around the dial multiple times a day. You never had to worry about where you left the receiver…it was always at the end of the thick, black, coiled wire, right where it ought to be. My neighborhood chums and I were green with envy when the rich family down the street got an extra-long extension cord for their wall-mounted kitchen phone. Being able to sit on the living room sofa and talk on the kitchen phone was high-tech, 60’s style. And what a handy thing it was to have that heavy receiver on a flexible wire. Say you were conversing with someone on the phone and you see your dog butt-scooting across the carpet; you just say, “…'scuse me a moment”, then swing the receiver, lasso-like above your head, releasing it with precision when you’ve gained sufficient centrifugal momentum and clock your mutt on his head. Problem solved.
I miss real phones.