It was one of those weekends for George Baker. Every time he pulled up Twitter – a slap in the face. When he went to meet his friends in Soho – a jarring reminder. When he watched Wednesday’s rerun of Modern Family – the cruelest insult of all. It seemed like the whole world was out to remind him – he was the one loser who didn’t have an iPad yet.

“I mean, I could pretend like I was waiting for the second generation. Or even just that I had a pre-order for a 3G one. But no one would believe me. I mean, look into these eyes. These are the eyes of an empty soul. These are the eyes of a man who knows that he is missing just one thing from his life – and he is unwilling to take those final steps to claim it,” Mr. Baker told us. “I mean, if I could limit myself to just the 16 GB model, then I could probably afford one. But I know I couldn’t stop there. I just know it.”

His “accidental” trip through Soho confirmed his worst fears – iPads were readily available and lines were at a bare minimum. If he just walked up the stairs and into the Apple Store, he could walk out with one in a matter of minutes – seconds, even. It would be so easy. He could take the rest of the afternoon to himself, playing buggy iPad games in glorious semi-HD, watching Netflix movies on the second-smallest screen in his house, typing emails on the awkward huge touchscreen keyboard – no, he could hold back. But… just playing with one for a while would be so nice…

He stares us dead in the eyes. “I can’t touch one. The second I do… it’s over. Like when my girlfriend bought an iPhone, and it took me three days before I paid my way out of my T-Mobile contract and switched to AT&T. The second one of those babies gets too close to me… I’ll do anything to have my own. Anything. Anything.”

Likewise, even the activities that usually granted him pleasure filled him with pain. A quick check of Twitter revealed LeVar Burton’s announcement that he’d “Been playin’ with the iPad for 3 hours straight… This thing is the shizznit!!!”, or his friends’ claims that “I’ll never use my iPhone or my laptop again – if anyone wants them, come over”. “God,” he told us, “If even Twitter can’t make me feel better about myself, what am I going to do?”

He celebrated this morning by marking off another day on the calendar that he managed to keep himself from throwing $700 away on another gadget he didn’t need. But as we checked in with him, he flatly told us, “I know that before long, I’m going to wake up with a hangover and a vague memory of ordering an iPad – an order I won’t be able to bring myself to cancel.”