I’ve been fascinated for years about human-computer interaction; specifically, how we tend to anthropomorphize our most-used (perhaps most-loved?) technologies. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels something akin to physical illness when my primary computer is in mid-crash, or the only person who has recurring nightmares about accidentally leaving my MacBook in a taxi or on a bus and watching it pull away.

I make no bones about my affection for my computer. I’ve been living an aggressively digital life since the late 1980s, and a large portion of what I do in real life has always been funneled through my computer—as I’ve said before, it’s where most of my friends live. But it’s weird what happens when I buy a new laptop; my emotional attachment gets transferred from old to new along with the data on the hard drive. Until then, the new computer is just a shiny new toy; afterwards, the old computer—the one I’ve been having nightmares about—is just another appliance.

But I don’t feel the same way about my backup drive, which holds the same information. It’s not just the collection of 128,849,018,880 bytes of data itself—it’s making them all actionable that creates the sense of genuine affection.

All of this is said by way of introduction to a strange experience I had yesterday.

Virgin Mobile is a rather quirky company, or at least, one that puts a lot of effort into appearing quirky. One of these quirks is the splash screen that appears when you start up any of their phones:

It’s not the most friendly font (which I’m approximating here because I can’t find a picture of it online), but there’s definitely a “Welcome to Macintosh” kind of vibe going on. It might be noted in passing that I almost never turn my cell phone off, preferring instead to just run it into the ground until the battery dies and the cell phone goes t’poof.

So yesterday I was packing up the Virgin Kyocera Loft to return it to the store, due to a laundry list of issues which led me to savage the phone earlier. Standard procedure: fricassee its brain with a systemwide reset to wipe out my personal data. Put it back together in the original packaging so the store doesn’t argue about the return. I was just closing up the box when I realized I had neglected to power the phone down. So I did.

And it said:

I’m sure I’ve seen that before; I just never really noticed it. But this time, it struck me. That’s not a font that you would normally associate with a broken-hearted, plaintive tone of voice, but that’s how I heard it in my head. I actually hesitated before closing the box.

That message… it made me feel sad. Writing this now, I feel sad again. That’s silly. Ridiculous. I owned that phone for all of three weeks. I rarely used it. I disliked nearly everything about it.

And somewhere in the limbic portions of my brain, that parting message gave me the impression that it was apologetic and remorseful for letting me down the way it had.

Like I said, it was a strange experience. I’d love to know what it is about that phone that gave it more personality than a toaster, because I sure wasn’t feeling it while I was working with it.

And, Loft, if it makes you feel any better—my next relationship with the Pantech Link? Even worse. After a one-night stand, I’m already regretting it.