I have an iPhone, which remains super glued to my hand roughly twenty out of the twenty-four hours in a day. And like any good urban twenty-something, I have a bloodlust for iPads that only the sacrifice of a crate of baby marsupials could cure. Or, you know, owning an iPad. But that is where my taste for Apple products ceases. I am typing this blog entry on my Dell laptop that I hold very dear to my heart, and will be a loyal Windows OS user until the inevitable bout of crippling Carpal Tunnel renders my spindly little digits unable to use a keyboard and track pad. This is partly due to the fact that Windows is a vastly superior OS (No I won’t have this fight with you, hipster elite). But it is also partly due to the fact that Apple stores scare the ever-loving shit out of me, because they’re like space ships. And you can die in space ships.

The front wall of Apple stores is all glass windows, and from within I tend to stare outside and imagine the entire building suddenly jumping into hyperspace. Right now for some reason Apple stores have a series of grey balloon-type thingies attached to the floor, which I imagine are the escape pods for all the tiny invisible gnomes, bred in Steve Job’s cavernous medieval dungeon, that run around the store nudging people toward the MacBooks by pushing gently on their calves. The walls are tall and metallic and the ceiling is high like it’s the heart of Lord Dark Helmet’s lead ship in the Spaceball fleet. Lining the walls and the center of the floor are devices you can control with naught but the swipe of a finger. Playing Plants vs. Zombies at or around level 22 feels like navigating the USS Enterprise through a thick asteroid field.

Everything is sanitized and clinical and the employees are like Stormtroopers in that they are extremely well trained and like-minded, but when charged with defending the Imperial shield generator on Endor’s moon from a bunch of assy little Ewoks, you’ll realize pretty quickly that neither could hit the broad side of a barn with an E-11 blaster. Not that we should have such expectations of Apple store employees. But I digress.

You can suffocate in a space ship. If some douchebag punctures the ship’s hull you’ve got about the length of a Rush song before your air supply depletes and the entire population of the ship experiences some very unpleasant lung collapse followed by unconsciousness and death. This fairly accurately describes how I feel every time I walk into an Apple store. Hyperventilation, increased heart rate, hallucinations that make me think everyone in the store is Jean-Luc Picard, and the inescapable thought that at any moment the entire building is going to collapse in on itself, no longer able to sustain the sheer gravitational force of smugness in the room. My atoms would combine with those of a collection of marked-down iPhone 3GSs, both of us having been ripped apart molecule by molecule and recombined in one tiny singularity that Steve Wozniak will combine with other collapsed Apple store singularities and sprinkle on his morning cereal.

But I digress again. There’s too much pretty shiny stuff in spaceships that I wouldn’t know what to do with, and that only a select few in the room have a firm grasp on the utility of. Apple stores are giant pretty shiny technolotariums that remind adult boys of Christmas morning, but remind those more clear-minded among us of the impending reign of our robot overlords.

So please, adorable red-head that insisted I visit him at work at the Apple store, please understand the depths of courage I had to summon in order to do so. Please understand that while you were impressing me with the upstairs conference room with built-in flat screen TVs, all I could see was Big Brother’s face popping up and demanding I do my morning calisthenics. Please understand that the real reason I’ll never buy an Apple computer is because I’m afraid of contaminating my home with a mutant space virus that would slowly kill me and my dog. Please understand that, while I do enjoy fiddling gleefully with an iPad like a kid in a bouncy castle, in the back of my mind I’m just a little bit worried that I’ll push the wrong icon on the screen and accidentally send the building into orbit.

–Katie Sisneros