Yesteday I took my daughter to the Apple Store to get her long-promised iPhone. (The “$99” iPhone, by the way, costs $99, plus a protection plan you’d better get whether or not the user is a 14-year-old girl who keeps the phone in a back pocket, plus the state sales tax that is charged on the “value” of the phone — $648 — and not the sale price, which means that the “$99” iPhone costs $248 plus a 2-year plan that adds $30 to my phone bill, for a grand total of $968. Happy birthday.)

After we were done depositing more fortunes into the Jobs family trust, my two kids got excited. “Look, Dad!” said my son, pointing to a store a few doors down, “A bookstore!”

The two of them were so excited because they hadn’t seen a bookstore in a mall — in fact, a bookstore anywhere — in so long. It was like spotting a unicorn.

“Where?” I said.

“Over there!”

I looked closely at the sign above the distant store. “That says Brookstone. They sell electronic gadgets.”

“Oh,” they both said. Then they went back to playing with their electronics as we walked to the car.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2012 at 8:47 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.