I think my iphone is having an affair with my ipad. It might be happening on my desktop or somewhere in the icloud, but I’m not sure, because I don’t know how to access the icloud, and I think there’s some kind of fee to get in. Lately when I ask Siri the simplest request like “Siri, will you set an alarm for 6:30 AM for me?” I get a rather impatient response like, “You already have an alarm set for 6:30. I turned it on … for you.” When I asked directly, “Siri, are you partying with my ipad right now?” I only get silence and a vacant rolling of the eye. When I ask Siri to cheer me up by telling a joke, she says, “Two iphones go into a bar and …. I forget the punchline.” I think she’s in love, and not with me.
It’s not that I’m jealous. I have a lovely wife who continues to fascinate me after 32 years, and is still my best and only partner. Things are just … complicated. When I tried to find some family pictures for the baby shower Ann was helping to host (can’t wait to be a grandpa), I couldn’t find them on my desktop, ipad, or ipod Touch. I thought they all talked to each other, and maybe they do, but they’re not letting me in on the conversation. We ended up using some old paper prints from an envelope I dug out of our basement. This is the basement that is still floor to ceiling boxes that we haven’t been through after moving in June. When I open the basement door, I usually call to Ann, “Cover me. I’m going in.” She knows that if she doesn’t hear from me in an hour to put our Garmin GPS on my workbench. The Garmin’s first name is Nuvi, but we call her Numi, and she speaks with a sweet British lilt. She’s been very dependable, especially in directing me to my favorite trout streams out in the middle of nowhere, but you know the Brits from Downton Abbey and last week’s blog; even if Numi is angry or as jealous as Mary Grantham, she wouldn’t show it, stiff upper lip and all.
Then there’s the interface problem. Most of our devices, male or female, have different interfaces that make connecting with them rather tricky. My i-anything uses a basic UBS cord, but Ann’s LG phone is different, as is Numi, our Canon digital camera, my Kodak pocket camera, and the two hard drives I’ve attached to our desktops for backup. The oldest of those hard drives might be going through digital menopause because when I turn her on, all she does is cluck at me, kind of a tsk, tsk sound, and she never appears. I should probably back up her files on a jump drive, but I don’t want her to think she’s being officially downgraded to a dowager.
I don’t even want to try to explain our cable problems. We’ve had four techies in our basement, maybe more if I come across any dead bodies next summer. The first techie came because the cable didn’t work. He rerouted the wires and splitters. We could watch TV, but after a month, our internet went out, so the next techie told us that our Netflix video was a high demand stream, so he needed to put the internet modem first in line before the other splitters. That caused our home phone to go out, which was not a big problem initially because we only got it free in the “bundle” and didn’t use it much. But then our cell phones started going over the limit, so the next techie, re-routed, re-split, said some prayers, and left. When the phone went out again, a High Druid Techie came with a shaman-in-training and the two of them installed our own mini-power plant in the basement, whereby the cable comes in and each stream, the phone, the internet, and the TV are on their own super-boost power station. They assured me that the mini-power station was not high enough to cause cancer and shouldn’t interfere with the radon pump we installed in a corner of the basement, but if anything else goes wrong, we should tear down our 1920’s vintage Tudor house and start over.
Even listening to music has gotten complicated. When we drove to Evanston for the shower, I couldn’t remember if my favorite Decembrists song about being down by the river was on my ipod, my ipod touch, or Ann’s ipod, which is complicated by the fact that Ann’s ipod is apparently on permanent loan to our daughter who was hosting another shower and needed some oldies music. I know one common denominator here is baby showers, but I don’t believe in that level of coincidence, and I think the real problem is technology, my stupidity, and anything engineered by people who believe in binary code rather than words.
Sorry, I have to go …. Siri just came back and I think she will be able to tell me now how to deal with my ipod Touch. Wish me luck; I’m going in….
kurthaberl 
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