Sunday, January 9, 2011

Terms and Conditions and Apple Privacy Policy

Hi computery people,

I wanted to update my iPhone apps today because the little red 'badge' thingy on the App Store icon excitedly signaled that 46 of my carefully-chosen (ha, as though I read 200,000 descriptions and reviews) apps needed updating. Cool! New features! Exciting. Apple loves risk-takers like me. Maybe those half-baked apps I took a chance on, even though there were only three reviews that curiously had the same spelling errors, will actually work now. Like the app that figures out what color my parachute actually is. There's an app for that. Good, because I have still have no idea. Or the one that can tell me how much that box of Rice-a-Roni costs down at the Safeway instead of what I'll pay for it at the upscale store I'm actually standing in and stupidly prefer, against my better judgment, just because the lighting is full-spectrum instead of what a friend of mine calls 'Frankenstein.' You gotta admit that it is def just too cool that the phone reads the UPC bar code on any box and looks it up, and tells me immediately where I can save 2 cents. All I have to is be willing to look like a cheapskate geek at the gourmet-ghetto grocery store, struggling to focus my iPhone camera on a Rice-a-Roni bar code. At least people leave you alone. They think you are either an artist hard at work, or one pork pie short of a picnic. Last week I used the bar-code app along with the Amazon app to score a case of Acai smoothie mix. 

This assumes I can get a 3G signal at the store, which I usually can't. And don't get me started about how many dropped calls during critical moments I have suffered with my cute 3GS and its $129/mo AT&T service. But it is SO fun calling AT&T tech support to complain and, once I get a real person, saying "Can you h ear m e  nooww?" a couple of times before the call drops. I had to call back on Skype.