If Smart Phones are So Smart…

Hello folks, let’s chat..More and more people are showing up in emergency rooms for injuries caused by walking and texting. Apparently, we the people can’t walk and text without getting distracted. I resemble that, but then I live in varying states of distraction. I shall refer you to my work on Squirrel Story Syndrome while I endeavor to stay on task.

Something’s fishy, y’all. If our cars are so smart they’re getting ready to drive themselves and our phones are so brilliant, why do they stand-by while we get out and walk into the lake? I’ll answer that. Because they’re evil and they like to gloat.

Take my dictation issues with Mary Elizabeth the Fourth, my smart phone. Her given name is Siri, (I taught her to call me Precious) but I christened her Mary Elizabeth several models ago when she first began helping me with directions. If you can call it that. Like her predecessors, Mary Elizabeth the Fourth has a poor attitude. She’s misdirected me on purpose countless times and now, under pretense of misunderstanding my southern accent, she manipulates my words to get me in trouble. Like the time she quoted me as headed to a book festival to “off” the other authors on my panel. I don’t care what she heard, I didn’t say that. The book business is hard but I haven’t gone all godfather on the competition.

My point, we need to stay alert or the wise guys win.

Recently my BFF and I were traveling with the aid of Mary Elizabeth. Granted, we had her volume down so we could discuss serious things like Caramel Lattes from Starbucks but that doesn’t prove that we missed any of her sassy pointers.

I said as much as I pulled over in the middle of no-where Texas.

“Red, I can’t explain this deja ju feeling but this is not the right way. You think Mary Elizabeth is pranking us again?”

“Yes,” my friend said. “Time for a u-ey. It does look familiar, but I think it’s just because we’ve been lost here before.”

Take that technology. It’s called human reasoning, and we’ve got it in spades.