Page 3 of The App Trap
Now I’d heard about this app from some of the folks at work. All the cool duderinos were using it these days to attempt to fulfil their desires. So, maybe it was time for me to take a slice of the action…
I negotiated the automatic door with a discreet wave of my trademark ‘Jedi’ hand gesture and shuffled into the store, chuckling to myself. The crouching tiger lyingin wait for me behind the counter was Gavin, a sales assistant with a penchant for very strong coffee and roll-ups, judging from the waft of his breath I inhaled during his speedy approach. The chewing gum that he was loudly chomping seemed to be having no effect on that.
As Gavin settled into his sales pitch, his excitement increased and his chewing became thus noisier and more ‘slappy’. You could hear the pockets of saliva catching between the gaps of his teeth. The aroma filled the immediate area with intermittent bursts of stale caffeine during his enthusiastic, promotion-hungry demonstration. He did offer me a pellet of gum, though––a terrific addition to his sales technique that took my mind off his breath for a bit.
“I remember when these came in sticks.” I examined the pellet before attempting to throw it into my mouth and missing it by an embarrassing amount.
Gavin simply offered me another one, seemingly paying no attention to the stray bullet of gum that I’d stamped into the carpet. A consummate professional, I thought.
“So, you could get this one. It’s a better phone and it comes with theTV Firstdeal, but not theKindreddeal,” he said, turning the corners of his mouth down into a childish frown.
“Yeah, I’m not really worried about that. Dating isn’t really my thing anyway,” I said, dismissively, one discreet eye still weighing up the offer on the board behind him.
“Right,” chirped Gavin, breaking up the word with a chuckle and throwing in a wink for good measure. Cheeky bastard. Perceptive… but a cheeky bastard nonetheless. “So, shall we go for the other one then? I can chuck in a free case.”
He winked again. I liked this guy. He had a roguish charm about him.
Gavin reeled me towards the till. The Velcro holding my apparently ‘immature’ wallet together ripped open and my Visa Debit card slid out (after about a minute of fumbling around trying to wriggle it free from the tightest slot).
Sold.
Gavin’s phone made a slightly grating trumpeting noise. He slid it out of his pocket, swiped the screen, smirked to himself and pursed his lips into the shape of a tiny ring doughnut. You could almost hear the ‘Oosh’.
“Kindredalert?” I joshed.
Gavin laughed cautiously.
“No mate, another app.”
“Oh… okay.”
I brushed my eyes over his phone screen just before he slid it back into his pocket. Guydar? Well, well… I totally had Gavin down for being straight. I swear, if it wasn’t for that breath I might even…
No… too weaselly.
As he slowly handed me my receipt, computing what I’d just said, I let the comment hang as I quickly grabbed my bag and walked out of the store—backwards for some reason, narrowly avoiding snapping a passing sausage dog’s backbone.
I arrived back at the ranch and savagely ripped the film wrapped around the tantalisingly shiny box. After the annoyingly tedious and lengthy setup procedure, I downloadedKindredand set up my profile, which was even less enjoyable than setting up the actual phone.
First of all, they wanted so many pages of stats about me that I didn’t even know that amount of stats existed. Then they wanted some prose describing how much greater I was than everyone else on here (or something likethat, anyway), plus they seemed to be angling for a decent picture of me.
Well, I can fill most of it in later, I thought. For now, I just added a bit in the bio bit:
Things I like: Films booze hanging out my mum.
It was only when I received my first message that I thought I’d better spruce up that profile on the double.
“Hi there. Says on your profile that you’re looking for men, but, judging from your blurb, looks like you’re into something else ”
Baffled, I re-checked my ‘blurb’, and to my horror, I noticed that I’d neglected to use the gift of punctuation, particularly between the words ‘hanging out’ and ‘my mum’.
Before you could say ‘facepalm emoji’, I rushed to message this dude back. Before I knew it, the email tennis had taken me up to 7pm, when Sean and I had progressed to a WhatsApp relationship.
After an hour or so of playful gifs, (which I realised was a kind of ‘gateway drug’ to sexy picture messaging), Sean started sending me a plethora of selfies, which started to become increasingly more, well… sexy as fuck. My goodness, I hoped this was him and not some god-like, unreachable soul from an obscure online catalogue.
I filed that thought to the back of my mind for now. Thanks to this relentless stream of visual stimulation, I was growing increasingly impatient to meet Sean in the flesh––flesh that with each new sext, was being revealed more and more, like a bonus round in a popular ‘catchphrase’ based game show, of which the name escaped me.
However: plot twist. It seemed that Sean had competition. Perhaps an early sign of things to come, I was starting to ‘plate spin’ other chats with various other guys. Then,another obstacle had decided to cock-block Sean: My mother. No, not like that––I’m pretty sure we’ve been through this already.
