The dead iPad Sketch

My iPad is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it. The plumage don’t enter into it. But since the blasted thing fell off its perch last November, it has somehow run up crippling excess data charges.

At first, I could think of only two possible explanations: either my iPad was pretending to be dead, while secretly downloading movies it personally fancied watching, or the phone company was overcharging me.

All I could say with any certainty was that the iPad had been lying on a shelf, insensible, unchargable, un-switch-on-able throughout December, and then I got a bill showing that during this period of total inactivity it had apparently racked up more charges than it had done in the entire two years I was using it.

‘This iPad has ceased to be,’ John Cleese would say, were he to take it back to the very boutique where he bought it, as I did the other day, when I marched into the Vodafone store in Victoria Station.

I put it on the counter, explained the mysterious charges and invited the wide-eyed booby in the red uniform to try to plug it into a charger and fire it up.

‘It’s not dead. It’s just resting,’ was pretty much his position. ‘Remarkable thing the iPad, isn’t it? Brilliant gadget. Are you enjoying it?’

‘Now look here, my lad, I know a dead iPad when I see one. Go on, plug it in. Try to switch it on and see what happens. Nothing. This iPad wouldn’t download excess data if I put 4,000 volts through it. This …is a dead iPad.’

I should point out that before going to the store I had had a very long, convoluted phone conversation with the Vodafone billing centre, during which they also rejected the notion that the iPad was pushing up the daisies.