It was too tempting. With a MacBook and an iPad in hand and my Blackberry contract expiring, I was already an easy mark for a jazzy new iPhone.
Temptation increased when my daughter moved to Chicago and got one to navigate the Metra. Not so much to talk, she explained, but because “without it I wouldn’t know where to get off.”
I scratched my head. Hadn’t my mom navigated the ‘L’ decades ago with only a ticket? But I held my tongue. After all, life was simpler then.
“You should definitely get one,” said my daughter-in-law. “They take great pictures.”
Since hers are primarily of my three-year-old granddaughter, I had to agree.
What seemed striking was that no one recommended that I get an iPhone for talking. The closest we got to talking about talking was my daughter’s comment that if we both had one, then I could go into something called FaceTime and we could see each other during a conversation. And that in the end was what sold vulnerable me, a few days after she moved out of town.
Excitedly, I ran to Facebook to announce my new status. The responses suggested I should have given myself a couple weeks for training.
“Hang in there!” said one. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
“The touch screen is still driving me crazy,” said another friend.
And from another: “What a brave 21st century woman you are!!!”
“Finger Tips,” the phone’s 16-page quick-start guide, told me more about “brave.” It devoted only one page to “make a call” and the rest to dizzying features like cutting and pasting text from a tiny touch screen, working with an “intelligent keyboard,” organizing my pictures and apps, and using the GPS to direct me to, say, Toronto. It even introduced me to a faceless robotic assistant named Siri, who asks “What can I help you with?” with the push of a button.
“Finger Tips” suggested that I ask Siri what she could do for me. I did, and she produced an impressive list. I could ask her if the Giants won, to give me directions home, to set up a meeting, to reserve a table at a restaurant, to find out what movies are playing, and to play Norah Jones music. If my mom were still alive, she said she could remind me to call her. She also offered to search the web for polar bears and define the word “mitosis.”
I took her up on her offer. Obediently, she reported the Giants score from the previous Sunday, inning by inning.
When I asked for a complete movie schedule for Columbus, she produced it, complete with trailers. I asked for hotels in Chicago, and she produced 22.
As long as I had a perfectly correct name for a restaurant that accepts online reservations, she could find it and make one for me. When I asked her to search the web for polar bears, she promptly a picture of a wooly white creature crossing the snow and provided his Latin name. Finally, to my chagrin, she performed spectacularly when I asked her to remind me to go exercise every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5 a.m. She promptly set up a reminder, which I promptly cancelled. (I hope.)
In the end, I must have overdone it with Siri because when we got to “mitosis,” she said: “I’m really sorry about this, but I can’t take any requests right now. Please try again later.”
I really couldn’t blame her. I’ve felt that way myself at times. Maybe Siri can be more than a robotic assistant. Maybe she can be my new role model.
Copyright 2012 Pat Snyder
