Texting girl falls into fountain, Microsoft smiles?
Recent security footage from a mall in Reading, Pa., shows a girl so busy texting that she tumbles straight into the mall fountain. A symbol of our times? Perfect companion for the Windows Phone campaign?
Some events make us stop and think. Then there are the events that make us stop, think, laugh, and propagate until we can't think of anyone else to send them to. This, surely, is one of those events.
This enthralling video seems to have been posted to several sites (including YouTube), and it's become quite popular. It may well have originated at BuzzFeed, though it was sent to me by a kind reader who enjoys the handle Super2online. And can only hope that it is real. (It certainly seems to be.)
The video shows a girl wandering around a mall, busily texting on her cell phone.
And then, well, she falls into the mall fountain.
You might be concerned that the girl was hurt. You might worry that her clothes were wet and it is very cold in Reading, Pa., in whose Berkshire Mall this footage was reportedly taken.
Fear not. As you will see, she just calmly gets out of the fountain and looks back at it as if wondering where it came from. Then, as if she has merely taken a wrong turning in her search for Wet Seal, she carries right on.
What turns this piece into a work of art, though, isn't merely the fact that it shows just the depth of truth in Microsoft's Windows Phone campaign.
It's the fact that you can hear what might well be the mall employees, as they can barely contain their joy at the comedy before their eyes. You see, there is a good side to intrusive surveillance.
Thankfully, we are allowed to see the texting tumble from two different angles so that we can savor the power of the cell phone and the weakness of the human being.
One can only hope that whichever mall worker decided to release this footage for the purpose of human education will not suffer water torture for their public-spiritedness.