iTouched by madness

I don't have an iPhone.  I'm tied into a seemingly endless contract for a Nokia that immediately developed a screen-obscuring layer of internal dust and collapses with exhaustion after anything more strenuous than a minimum-length text.

I'd like an iPhone, of course.  I'm sure there are superior handsets but I want the one everyone else looks cool stroking.  This unoriginal thought process led to me buying an iTouch, aka the red-headed illegitimate love child of the iPod and the iPhone.  It does everything an iPod does and looks a bit like an iPhone, except it doesn't make calls or, most importantly, connect to the internet.  It's supposed to but mine just doesn't.  I was on the brink of taking it back when I drunkenly spooned it onto the kitchen floor, smashing a spider's web of cracks into the screen and somewhat damaging my credibility as an aggrieved punter.

But one thing my little white e-elephant has done is reintroduce me to Tetris.  The working day has now become a very long prelude to getting to play it on the tube home.  I dabbled with it as an evening TV accompaniment until the missus forcefully suggested that a severe heroin habit would be more socially acceptable.  So the tube is my special shape-arranging time, with earphones firmly screwed in to make sure I am as unaware of the vile northern line as possible.

This hermetic exclusion field is broken at least twice a week by one of the hoard of stateless tourists who roam the London Bridge tube platforms, large of backpack and baffled of expression.  I'm happy to help people out - give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses waving a 2003-vintage underground map - but I do object to the ones who walk up to you while you are wearing bright white earphones and just start talking.  I more than object to - I loathe, in fact - people like the man who last week: jabbed me aggressively in the shoulder while I was dealing with a particularly tricky multiple-line pile-up; started gabbling while I came out of the game, paused my music and removed my earphones; looking irritated when I asked him start again; and processed my clear and precise instructions on how to get to Oxford Street with a blank expression before spinning on his heel and marching away without a word of thanks.

How to deal with a charmless time-waster like that?  A solution presents itself.  Bop him on the head, bend his legs to make an L-shape and drop him into a pit to align symmetrically with the Taiwanese map-in-face-thruster that was arranged into a sqaure and lobbed in the week before.  My only concern is that striking tube employees may make erratic point-counters.