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Wife and I recently got new phones. She had a cracked screen and mine was so ancient it couldn't run tiktok without crashing so it was time. We gathered up the kids, promised ice cream afterwards, and headed to the phone store. I hate the phone store. It's completely soulless and full of mind-and-social-fabric-destroying devices. I would rather be at the bead store than the phone store (IYKYK).
I was helped by a nice younger dude with a man bun. As he was tapping away at his iPad he tells me I might be eligible for an upgrade. "Great!" I say. He keeps tapping away as I watch my kids run around the store touching things they shouldn't be touching while my wife tries to wrangle them. This trip better not take more than an hour. Man bun tells me his wife is an elementary school teacher, neat. More time passes. I'm getting irritated. I ask, "So... uh, can I get an upgrade?"
Man bun: "May I."
Me: "Come again?"
Man bun: "It's 'May I get an upgrade?'"
I think it's a universal human experience to feel a twinge of irritation when you are corrected, but man o' man it's doubly worse when you're right and they're wrong. I normally would have dropped it but since I was in the phone store, and I was primed for some confrontation.
"No. I'm not asking you for permission to get an upgrade, I'm asking if it's possible. Therefore, 'can' is the correct word."
Man bun thinks for a second, then says, "Yeah I guess you're right." I'm glad he cares about the state of the English language but damn guy at least be right about it. I imagine his wife regales him about owning 8-year-olds asking to go to the bathroom and he got the wrong idea. "I dunno, CAN you???"
This is an example of HYPERCORRECTION. I'm certainly guilty of this; it's probably my worst tendency with language. People usually overcorrect because of something they learned in primary school, like ending a sentence in a preposition (totally fine btw). Take this example:
Sounds correct, right? I kinda vaguely remember thinking that "I" was a more posh way to refer to yourself than "me". But all you have to do is remove the other person to realize you're wrong:
Clearly deranged. "I" is a subject pronoun, "me" is an object pronoun. If you're the one doing the verbing, it's "I"; if you're the one getting verbed it's "me". Thus:
Or the slightly better (imo):
I can't even imagine some wagie playing the pedant without them immediately getting punched in the face. Which is perhaps why I would do such a shop online, but really why do you even need to go to a phone shop? Is this some American thing where all the good deals are gated behind in person interactions for no reason?
Phones are like groceries or clothes, it’s the kind of physical object you really want to look at in person and hold before buying.
At the supermarket, fruits, vegetables, and sometimes even packaged goods frequently have undergone enough rough handling that you'll want to skip one item in favor of another that nominally is the same. At the department store, vague labeling standards frequently mean that one clothing brand's sizing or fit does not match another's.
But none of that applies to phones. It is highly unlikely that they will be damaged in shipping. And the statistics sites give objective measurements in inches or centimeters, not just vague "small, medium, or large" labels.
If I have one complaint about my new Samsung A17 5G, it is that its vibration is noticeably weaker/quieter than that of my old Samsung A32 5G, forcing me to switch my text-message notifications from vibration to noise so that I don't miss them. But I never would have noticed that difference even if I had checked out the A17 5G in the store.
Yes but also how are you going to evaluate the weight of the phone, how it fits in your pocket, the brightness of the screen, how well the camera works, etc etc?
Literally all of that information is on the statistics websites, which let you compare prospective new phones to your current phone. See the link in my previous comment.
Yes but that’s the way I prefer to do it, and myself and the body politic will not be talked out of our right to shop in store.
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