iPad 2 Price Drops From 'Arm And A Leg' To More Reasonable 'One Kidney'

Too Much Free Time

from the true-price-of-early-adoption dept

From Shanghai Daily comes this somewhat tragic tale of tech desire gone horribly wrong:

A 17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.

Now, while most of us have desired the latest shiny new thing, few of us have had the courage to put one of our organs on the line for it. Maybe it’s just the reasonable fear of unlicensed surgical procedures holding us back or the threat of being prosecuted for illegally harvesting our own organs. Either way, the bar has been raised and no longer will onlookers be impressed by our tales of camping outside the Apple store for 36 hours for a shot at the latest iWhatever.

While this student regrets his decision to go through life with a half-rack of kidneys, he’s already built some wiggle room into his story:

"I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it," said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. "A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan."

A broker contacted him? Unless by "contacted him," he means "clicked on a Google ad for ‘SELL YOUR KIDNEY NOW,’" I’m pretty sure the kidney seller made the first contact. I could be wrong. (The possibility is high. See also: this post.) Of course, this could mean he said something irresponsible like, "I’d sell a kidney to get one of those," in the wrong forum at the wrong time and someone "reached out." You never know.

Unfortunately for this student (whose lifetime stats currently read: iPad[s]: 1; Kidney[s]: -1) there may be little recourse available. The hospital where the removal was performed (Chenzhou No. 198) is "not qualified to perform organ transplants," meaning that even if said kidney is found, he’ll need to talk another hospital into re-inserting Kidney A. The broker has also vanished, covering his tracks by turning his phone off. (That’s not a punchline. It’s right there in the article.)

When he returned home, his mother found out and reported to the police immediately. But they could not locate the broker whose cell phone was always powered off, the report said.

Well, I hope we can all take something from this experience and apply it to our own lives. For me, it’s "temper your desires." Or, if you can’t, at least perform the kidney-iPad exchange here in the US, where the court systems and ambulance chasers will be more than happy to help you argue that this is Apple’s fault.

Filed Under: ipad, kidney