Non sequitur – surviving with my new ‘smart’ phone
OK, I finally decided to take a week off work, and Cindie decided it was time I update my trusty old dumb phone to a newer, more modern smart phone. You know, walk away from the Stone Age, take a plunge into the present and enjoy all the great new technology that’s available. Thanks, darling.
At first it sounded like it might actually be a good idea, but then I discovered I needed smart phone lessons. Thankfully, due to my eminent and somewhat hasty departure for Southern California, the lessons were brief —with the promise of more to come later. Loverly.
Now anybody who knows me knows I’m not a texting type person. You send me a text, and I’m likely to phone you back. In fact, I always lament if our smart phones point the way to our future evolution, we’re all likely develop long pointy thumbs and lose the ability to speak in the next few hundred years.
Ah, but let me introduce you to Siri, Cindie says. You can say, Siri, send Bozo Lips a text, say what you want to say (Siri will convert your words to text), and then all you have to do is tell Siri to send it. You don’t have to type a thing. (Of course, I should have known I was in trouble right away because Siri doesn’t get Cindie — she says Signdee — spelled Synde.)
Yeah, Siri’s a real sweetheart, but let me tell ya, if I could have dragged her happy, smiley voice out of the phone several times during my trip, I would have pushed her up against the driver’s side window and choked her right to death! Instead, I had to settle for just throwing her spry soprano across the car in disgust. I left Susanville for Southern California, and I sent Synde a few Siri text messages and the world was good. Synde responds she loves getting text messages from me. I’m sure.
So, I’m at In and Out in Reno, and I notice the freeway sign there says 580 South instead of the 395 South I remember from years ago.
No problem I think confidently. I have a smart phone and Siri, and as Synde has suggested, I dutifully put my fate in the hands of technology and ask for directions to Highway 395 South.
After Siri runs me all around through several neighborhoods and up and down side streets in Reno, she finally pops me out on to a main street. I see the freeway a few blocks away and think all my prayers are answered.
Until I get closer, and Siri tells me to drive half a mile, park my car and then walk 900 feet to my destination. Thank you so much.
Then, I make a non-technological human decision and correctly determine 580 South must be 395 South, too, and get on my way.
Poor Siri. She’s still trying to lead me to the highway I am already driving on, and tells me to make a U-turn at every opportunity. I couldn’t figure out how to make the her shut up. She even told me I was rude, and I shouldn’t talk to her that way. Must have been the expletives. So I buried her mumbling presence under my leather coat on the back seat. Jeez.
Then a few days later, I’m seeking directions
to my sister’s house in Tujunga, near
Burbank. Siri doesn’t know where Tujunga is, but she can give me directions to the Two
Jungas restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Helpful? Hey, Siri, I got a couple of wild Jungas fer ya!
On my way home near Sacramento, I yell out, Hey, Siri, how about a Chinese restaurant. Siri promptly gives me a list, including one that is only 1.4 miles away. I sit up a little straighter, shaking like a bobble head thinking what a great psychic I must be.
Well, not really. Would I like directions to this restaurant? Absolutely, I say, and Siri tells me to take the next off ramp and make a Uturn. I’m thinking, oh no, here I go again.
Sure enough, I make the U-turn onto I-5 South, and Siri tells me to continue 374 miles south on I-5 to my destination. We tried that one twice.
Then I decided to send Synde a text telling her of my recent misfortunes with the mighty Siri, and the phone responds with, “I don’t
understand, ‘Send Synde attack?’”
Rrrr, back under the leather jacket. Then I see a sign that tells me oral texting while driving could cost me $162 on my first offense. All righty then.
Luckily, I have insurance on this phone, so if I get too frustrated I can always put it under a wheel and drive back and forth over it a few times. But then I bet good old Siri would just come back to haunt me again once I got a replacement phone.
Ah, with my luck with all this new technology, I hope the ETs won’t put me in charge of a spacecraft. That sounds like a second Roswell crash to me.
