This Week’s Thingamajigs
My buddy leans over the kidney-shaped table at Starbucks and only then do I realize that I’m guzzling coffee with a circuitry gunslinger.
Hanging from his belt like a pair of six-shooters, each sheathed in soft leather, are the communications wizardry of the age: a cell phone he could conceal in his palm and one of those personal data assistants, or PDAs, in the lingo of my friend, whom I now refer to as the Gadget Boy.
When I make a crack about all this personal hardware, he smiles sheepishly. “Hey,” he says. “I need this stuff to do business.”
But for my friend and millions of other American men, the lust for newer, smaller, niftier-looking “tools” has much more to do with pecking order than with work performance. It goes back to childhood, when durable goods dictate rungs in the playground hierarchy. He who shows off the latest gizmo first is on top, if only for a day.
Gadgetry may have evolved, but the urge to climb has not.
Take a look around any known gadget-freak hangouts. On airplanes, for example, you’ll see guys flipping through some slick frequent-flier magazine, ogling portable thin-screened TVs, electronic vehicle compasses and thumb-sized pocket surveillance cameras. In the stores Brookstone or the Sharper Image, you’ll see them browsing happily for as long as it takes their girlfriends to buy more Kenneth Coles for their already Kathie Lee-size shoe collections.
“Women love many of our items if they perceive them to be practical and necessary to get a task done,” explains Sharper Image spokesman Lou Soucie. “Men, on the other hand, will buy the same item because it’s interesting, fascinating and fun.”
Tim Keaveny, manager of the company’s Beverly Hills store, puts it this way: “Men like shiny things. They like stuff with lights and buttons, things that look cool, no matter what they do.”
Though the words “Some Assembly Required” scare me, I’m told that many men enjoy things they can put together. Case in point: Mercedes-Benz’s new lightweight all-terrain mountain bike, which can be broken down, packed into a carrying case and then reassembled. Bernhard Leitner, son of the bike’s designer, swears that even someone as hapless as me, who runs from gadgets as if they were draft notices, can make it work. He comes by my office, eager to show how it’s done. I follow along with his patient instructions, watching him fold the handlebars, disconnect the derailleurs and swivel off the seat.
When it’s my turn, my hands shake. Still, I muddle through and tell Leitner I’m ready to solo. Later, I sweat and curse as the handlebars bend at a cruel angle and the derailleurs refuse to comply. Screws I never knew existed drop off the bike and roll across the floor.
I phone Leitner and ask him to retrieve his contraption. No offense, I say, your bike is a marvel of technology. It’s me that’s defective.
When I relate these events to the Gadget Boy, he smiles reassuringly. But I have the feeling that he isn’t really listening, that somewhere in the recesses of his brain he’s conjuring the curves of an as-yet-invented PDA.
Some svelte thingamajig with lots of lights, shiny buttons and electronic whistles.
And don’t forget cool-looking.
