A New Year's Eve with Gender Illusionists

For almost my entire adult life, I’ve been working at New Year. In recent years, I can still recall the mixture of excitement and mild, mild panic, at the approaching New Year whilst we sat in the office and wondered just how many text messages would be sent to our network of nightclub screens that evening.

It is rather annoying having to sit across New Year’s Eve watching screens, typing stuff and drinking as much caffeine-laced Coca Cola as your stomach will allow, whilst every one else on the planet appears to be jumping around with excitement. I do remember that we kept on getting traffic well into New Year’s Day, most years, because the networks were so jammed with celebratory text messages.

Last year, if I recall correctly, I did nothing. Relaxing. In fact I think I went to sleep at 11pm.

So this year I thought I should do something. In particular, I wanted to observe how the mobile handset was used here in America during the evening. In the UK, for example, you can’t go out of your place without your mobile handset on New Year’s Eve. Absolutely not. And most people are glued to their handsets for the evening too.

Where better to check out New Year’s Eve in San Francisco than at AsiaSF, home of the world-famed ‘gender illusionist’ waiters/waitresses. It’s essentially a restaurant with a wide central bar reminiscent of a fashion show runway. Lots of people had recommended the place so I figured it might be worthwhile trying something a little… different.

Here are some of the ladies:

I wasn’t disappointed from a mobile perspective. We arrived in the middle of the 830pm ‘show’ — a well proportioned lady was in the midst of strutting her stuff on the bar as we were led to our table. I waved hello to her and surveyed the room for mobile activity as I sat down. The next table were enthusiastically screaming for the strutting lady. Nearly every one of the 6 seated guests were holding up mobile handsets snapping pictures and taking video shots.

Sodding Motorola RAZRs everywhere, though. Almost every damn handset on that particular table was a RAZR or a RAZR copy. They do love their RAZRs here. It causes extreme annoyance to me every time I see one. It was a brilliant handset in its time. WAS. Not now. It’s years old. We’re still talking first generation RAZRs. And these poor folk on the table next to me were trying to take pictures with the piss-poor RAZR camera. I think one guy was trying to take a video. I almost got up from my table to grab his handset and slam it against the wall.

It’s achingly annoying to see people wanting to use their handsets like they’ve been educated. You know, it’s entering the public consciousness that you can snap pictures with your handset — even video — and then mail it or upload it.

I forced myself to avoid focusing on the RAZRites around me and to entertain my guests.

You know you’re focussing a little too much on mobile when you’re reading the cocktail list and your eyes automatically centre immediately on the word ‘Blackberry’. In this case it was a blackberry mojito though, not a real time email device.

I tried switching off. I sipped more cocktails. I ate delicious Asian style food. But I couldn’t stop looking about at the RAZRites. It was really beginning to seriously annoy me.

When some of my party had departed for various cigarette/bathroom (“restroom”) breaks, I lent over to one lady and asked her about her RAZR.

“How are the photos?” I asked, indicating her RAZR. I already knew the answer. Shit. No flash, dark environment — think pixelated shite, basically.

“Oh, they’re OK,” she tells me. They’re all friendly in San Francisco. Nobody thinks you’re about to stab them if you ask them mobile related questions without a full, formal introduction.

“Have you sent any to your friends this evening?” I enquired.

“Ah nahhh. It doesn’t work on my phone. But I think I’ve got a photo from my friend in New York,” she breaks off as she navigates the piss-poor Motorola shite interface to her messages. For a moment I am elated. ‘My gosh,’ I think, ‘She’s been sent a picture message!’

Click, click, sodding click. She’s found her messages. Only, she’s now navigating into the text message menu. I automatically think I should correct her but I hold my tongue. Arse. She brings up a text message containing the words (I’m paraphrasing) “Congratulations! You have received a picture message, to view it, log on to www.some.shite.network.operator.address.com with the username LAjAKiPy and the password QIUYQ121.”

“I’ll need to look at it when I get home,” she explains, “But it’s pretty neat, eh?”

Fake smiles abounded across my face as I tried my very best to cover my abject disappointment.

When she gets home, she’ll probably find a shit small 100 pixel wide image that might have made sense at 11pm on New Year’s Eve, but won’t quite have the same effect the next day viewed on a big computer screen. Deary me.

It would, I suspect, have been quite a coup if I’d managed to do a quick interview with one of the gender illusionists about their mobile habits. Alas that thought didn’t enter my head during the evening. Instead I was fixating on the sodding RAZRs.

One chap was sporting an iPhone. Great. But the camera was useless in the darkened restaurant. He was doing his best to take a group shot of his friends at the table and was completely, completely outdone by a tiny girl sat next to him with a cheapo digital camera.

I did take my Nokia N95 along. I was thinking of doing some video or maybe some pictures. But I really felt rather self conscious about brandishing it in front of the mobile-feature-starved patrons. Especially since I’ve upgraded the firmware on the N95 so it takes pictures fast and nicely, particularly in the dark.

Here’s a pic of me, some balloons although my HAPPY NEW YEAR paper hat had fallen off by this point:

My heart warmed as I saw lots of people begin sending and receiving text messages as 11pm arrived. It’s still very much a ‘talking’ environment over here in America though and quite a few folk were doing their best to talk away to friends despite the volume of noise pumping out of the AsiaSF sound system. One chap had his handset cupped to his mouth with one hand, whilst the other hand cupped the earpiece to his ear. It wasn’t working that well I don’t think as he was going bright red trying to listen. I did feel like pointing out the benefits of texting or mobile instant messaging. There’s a time and a place, though.

Happy New Year!