The iPhone, embarrassment and ladies of the night

Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 October 2009 07:47

Opinion and Analysis

I was initially inclined not to call N the following night. But I was curious to find out why he had sent me that message as both guys are on extremely good terms with me.

When I spoke to him and asked him to come by at 2.30am to pick me up, he was in a cheery mood, definitely not the mood exhibited by a man who has sent someone an abusive text and is conversing with that same person.

After we set off, I asked him about the text message. And thereby hangs a tale.

Both J and N quite often ferry people to legal brothels in this great city. This happens so often, that over the course of the years, these establishments have taken to rewarding them with a small tip every time a customer uses the services of the house of pleasure.

And as an extension of this, many of the women who work at these places have got acquainted with J and N; after work, they quite often call J or N to take them home. Obviously, they feel safe with cabbies they know; if a woman emerges from a brothel at 2.30am and engages the first available cabbie, there is no telling how the man will behave.

It turns out that one of the ladies of the night had, for some reason or the other, complained about J to the madam who runs the brothel at which she works.

She'd described J as giving her the "heebie-jeebies"; and this, according to J, simply because, while he was dropping her at night on one occasion, he asked for street names so he could find his way without being told "take a left here" and "take a right there".

N was really annoyed when he found out about this - the madam has a crush on him - and had decided to send the woman in question a nasty message. He sent the message with a flick of his fingers as he normally does - as befits an iPhone owner - and thought nothing of it.

What didn't strike him was that the woman has a name quite similar to mine - both our mobile numbers are in his address book. He blindly located what he thought was the correct name and flicked across that epic message: "Go f*** yourself. From me and J."

He was terribly embarrassed when I told him about his mistake and apologised profusely. I laughed all the way home.

N stopped talking about the virtues of the iPhone for some days after that. J has had a chance to get a few jibes back. I know some may put this down solely to user error - but without the functionality being available in the first place, it would never have occurred.

When gadgets provide extra functionality and boast of being the ultimate in any field, the average human being tends to think that they are actually intelligent devices. It takes an incident such as this to realise that even with a slick device like the iPhone things can sometimes go embarrassingly wrong.