139 Quotes by Charlie Brooker

If I ran a national burger franchise - which I don't - I'd make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.

What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer or the shop or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant - their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it.

The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.

I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.

Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.

Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.

If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.

People bemoan the loss of watercooler chat, but I think that there's more of that than ever. It's just that it's online.

Apple excels at taking existing concepts - computers, MP3 players, conceit - and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration.