Basic Life Skills with Siri

Alexis absolutely goes to effort to try to make me feel old. What she doesn’t realize is that it’s most effective when she isn’t trying. The accidental olds are WAY worse than the purposeful olds.

MY KID DIDN’T KNOW WHAT A BUSY SIGNAL WAS.

For a very long time, it has made Alexis crazy that I don’t call in to radio stations to try to win all of the things. The reason I don’t is pretty clear cut – we’re seemingly always in the car when listening to the radio and I can’t do that call and re-call thing while driving.

Alexis has her own phone now. SHE CAN CALL!

The first obstacle to her being in charge of trying to win stuff was for her to figure out how to dial a phone number. It turns out that the numbers I programmed for her before giving her the phone were all of the numbers she needed in life. She has never before had to press the numbers to make a call. On the rare days that she has called anyone prior to having her own phone, someone has done the dialing for her or she’s been able to use a stored number.

So there’s that. This generation doesn’t need to dial phone numbers. ::Blink::Blink::

The second obstacle was that she legit had no idea what that fast beep tone meant after she dialed. Apparently call waiting has been around her entire life so she didn’t even know it was possible for a number to be busy. ::Blink::Blink::Blink::

Once I explained busy signals, it came time to try calling again. The idea of hanging up and calling again was utterly confusing to she who doesn’t realize that you used to have to put actual money into phones on a street corner if you wanted to make a call when you weren’t home and don’t even think about talking about phones with a cord because ::Blink::Blink::Blink::Blink::

She will tell you that those only exist in offices and such.

We went back and forth for a long minute trying to understand how to hang up and call again. I thought maybe Alexis was starting to understand what I was saying, but then she definitely didn’t, but NO MATTER. THAT’S WHAT SIRI IS FOR.

“Siri, call the last number again,” she demanded.

I’ll be damned if Siri didn’t take all of the buttons out of the equation and just do it for her.

I remember thinking it was total garbage that we don’t have flying cars and robots and all of that yet (the Jetsons have been selling lies for a LONG time), but apparently I was just looking for the robots in the wrong places. They’re right there, making it so our kids don’t have to learn things that seemed so basic a bunch of years ago.

Man, I’m old.

Comments

[Kalendi]

Ha, love this. Have you had the typewriter conversation or the rotary dial one? I went to a museum in Arizona and there were rooms from different decades (one was set up almost exactly like my parents living room)...talk about feeling old!