‘Stay here with the trolley,” said my wife, asking me to hang around the cereals aisle in a humungous hypermarket, and then my phone battery died.
For a few minutes after my wife left, life was good and uncomplicated as I checked social media to see what was trending. Then the five-inch screen of my smartphone went blank and a sign came up showing a plug with a wire.
“You need to recharge now. Go to settings ...” and before it could say anything more, there was a swirling white circle, stars of various colours floated about, and my phone shut down.
I looked up and realised that a grown-up man in a cereal aisle, leaning on a trolley and just loitering, might seem a bit strange to other shoppers. So I picked up a cereal box that showed a tiger or some strange bird pointing to chocolate-dipped wheat cereals and enumerating its health benefits.
After a while, I felt that I was being watched and saw that a woman was staring at me. Then I realised she was looking past me and reading something over my head. We then did the “social dance”, saying ‘excuse me’, as we both pushed our trolleys to the left, and then pushed them to the right and pushed them back again to the left.
I hurriedly moved a few steps away and as I stood there, saw another woman looking past my ear. “What happened to good-old nutritious egg and toast, or idli (small rice cakes) and sambar (a lentil-based vegetable broth) breakfast for the child?” I grumbled walking away from the aisle as casually as possible, with one wheel of the trolley taking me in another direction!
After a while, I looked at my watch and panicked.
With a smartphone one can never get lost in a hypermarket. You phone and tell your wife you are waiting in the pickle, papad (poppadom) aisle and there would be a happy reunion a few moments later, just as in the Bollywood movies, only that someone is on the loudspeaker saying, “Percy detergent now only for Dh18.50.”
I squeaked along for a while looking into the usual suspect aisles: Wheat flour (“India’s best atta for flaky hand-made breads”), rice (“the only biryani rice is Khan’s Pakistani basmati”) and cooking oil (“sweetheart oil for your sweet heart”) ... but she was not there.
I rushed back to the cereals aisle and then to the cosmetics aisle. “Hello, sir, would you like to try this?” asked a saleswoman, holding an eau de toilette bottle and ready to spray it on me. I frantically waved “No” to her as perfume gives me allergies and I start to sneeze uncontrollably and people get fed up saying, “God Bless” so many times.
Should I go to the front desk and request someone to shout over the speaker system: “Mrs Saberi, please come to customer service, your husband is waiting for you.” Then I decided that was not a good idea as many shoppers there were her students and their mothers from her school.
Why do Android batteries have to die so fast? I cursed. My son later told me to delete all the useless apps, especially Facebook, as they run in the background and drain the energy out of the smartphone. An expert says some apps have special access to the internet. They send notifications or keep playing in the background.
One way to get more life out of your battery is to delete, one by one, all those apps that you do not need.
Why can’t someone just make a better battery that lasts longer so that I do not have to stop being social and not get panic attacks in the hypermarket and make my wife snigger?
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
