Tag Archives: technology

244. Newborn Baby App — BUYER BEWARE!

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They first hook you in with how cute they are. And they are cute, DO NOT GET ME WRONG. I’m not, nor have I ever been, fundamentally against babies—UNTIL NOW. As the first reviewer of this oh-so-wonderful app, my intention is not to denigrate other couples that choose to go down this route, but I just want to make sure that if this is you, if you are considering buying this app—AND IT IS NOT CHEAP!!—then you absolutely must understand the full extent of what that means. I also want to make it clear that, to be fair, if this site allowed half-ratings, I would give it a 1.5, and not strictly a 1, but basically this is what happened.

I got the baby app (NEWBORN 101), and it pooped in my phone. When I took the phone back to the manufacturer for repair (I was still under warranty), they asked me if I had done anything to tamper with the phone. 

“Like what do you mean?”

“Did you yourself shit into this phone?”

“For what reason would I do that?”

“I don’t know, like maybe for a practical joke?”

“No, I did not shit into my phone. I got the new baby app, this is what I’m telling you, and as soon as I downloaded it, it screamed once and crapped, I kid you not.”

When I returned later, they said that they could not help me. The customer service fellow in blue polo said that when they had opened it up to start working on my phone, the smell was not only like poop, which could have been endurable, as at least something on the continuum of what they might have experienced smelling once or twice in their lives. But it was frankly more like poop mixed with throw-up and the rotten carcasses of a thousand rats at the height of decomposition.

“Come on,” I said. “Nothing can smell that bad.”

“Seriously,” he said. “If you could imagine what I just explained to you as a smell, then you might approximate the point-oh-oh-oh-oh one percent of the actual terribleness of this NEWBORN stuff.”

“Oh-oh,” I said.

“Not funny,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Two of the technicians had to go home with migraines. It was that toxic, possibly carcinogenic.”

“But what can be done?”

“What can be done? This is the question. You’re the one who bought it, and now you’ve got to clean it up.”

 

243. Emoji Problems

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It started with a few back and forth texts of emojis late one night. The next evening, a Friday,  typically my poker night with the guys, my girlfriend came to the door.

“You brought over pizza, how nice,” I said. “And, oh, gosh, look at that, a Netflix.”

“Jerry Maguire,” she said, and gave me a kissing face with heart-shaped eyes. “‘You had me at hello.’” It was her favorite line from the movie, or so I learned the first, second and third times we’d watched it.

“That’s so sweet, but you know, it’s poker night. The guys are here.” I gave her a frowning face with open mouth. 

“But you said you wanted me to come over.”

“I did? When?”

“In your texts.”

“No, I didn’t. They were just emojis.”

“But you can communicate a message in emojis. They’re pictures, symbols or whatever. They’re meant to say something.”

“That might be true,” I said, but again I had to remind her that it was poker night. I gave her an expressionless face.

She gave me a pouting face.

“Come on,” I said. I gave her a face in cold sweat, but she wasn’t buying it.  ”Okay,” I said, and gave her a little smiling shit pile. “See?” I feel this bad. She still wasn’t buying it. Finally, I said, “Do you want to come in?”

She gave me a face with look of triumph and stepped through the door.

Nothing that disturbing happened for the next few days, although we continued to send emojis back and forth. It was easier than having to compose actual words, which could be tiring.

She gave me a volcano, and I gave her a snowflake.

She gave me a ring, with a question mark.

I gave her a bomb, exclamation point.

She gave me an open lock, a growing heart, a bride with veil.

I gave her a runner, a bell with cancellation stroke, an imp.

Basic stuff.

And then one day she called me at work. She had been crying.

“I can’t talk right now, honey,” I said. “I really really really want to, but I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“This is too difficult to say out loud, anyway,” she said. “I’ll just text you.”

But she didn’t mean to text me. She wanted to emoji. I considered asking her to write in real words, but I was in the middle of the meeting.

When I drove up to her place that night, she ran out to greet me. ”Thank you for understanding! I was so scared about telling you.”

“No problem at all,” I said.

“You’re not mad?” She gave me a worried face.

“Of course not, no.” I gave her a flexing bicep. “Why would I be mad?”

“Well, I guess from our last communication,” she said. “Most men wouldn’t put up with that.” She gave me a man in turban next to a tropical fish that was going ZZZZ.

“Um,” I said.

Over the next few weeks, our emojis progressed.

She gave me a taxi, a crystal ball, a red balloon, a ghost, a shrimp, a needle, a cactus, a dog’s head with its tongue hanging out.

I gave her a full moon with face looking to the side.

She gave me a snail, a sunset over buildings, a bikini.

I gave her a dress, a glass of wine, a love hotel.

She gave me kids. Here they were, two loudly crying faces. She gave me that.

I gave her a trophy, a lemon.

She gave me the caution sign.

I gave her a face without mouth next to a thought bubble.

Where was the lightning bolt?

She gave me a cyclone, a collision, a perennial thumbs down.

I gave her a frog.

She gave me a bust in silhouette.

“I don’t even know what that means,” I tried to text, but by then, we were clearly done with words. And I felt bad about this, for sure, but I gave her, finally, a closed mailbox with lowered flag.

Eventually, in response, she gave me the hammer, and I gave her—am still in fact giving her—a money bag.

216. Angry Birds

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Rick, the ranger, taken by the game Angry Birds on his iPad while supposedly charged with watching that the day hikers were aware of, and did not dare try crossing the badly damaged rope bridge, missed the wild boar that had slipped past his truck and walked out over the ravine.

Two days earlier, in a most terrible early spring storm, a flock of carrion were blown down over the ravine and in the confusion of the driving, frozen rain, got tangled up in the rope meshing of the handrail. In their mad attempt of escape, they had also broken a few of the boards. While Rick was playing his game and waiting for the cleanup crew, the wild pig walked out onto the bridge for one of these rotting carcasses.

The ranger looked up from his game to see the boar after it grabbed hold of one of the birds and while trying to pull it free, slipped through the opening of the bridge, through the space between broken boards. At first he couldn’t see the boar from where the truck was parked, but through his open window, he could hear the animal’s loud squealing.

“Oh, for criminey’s sake,” the ranger said after he stumbled out of his vehicle to see the boar hanging from the bridge by the rotting carcass of the bird still tangled up in the ropes. He shouted from the edge of the bridge, “Let it go! Just fall to the river, you stupid pig.”

But the river was a hundred and fifty feet below, and full of rocks, in some places, and though possible to survive if lucky enough to land in a deeper pool, the river this time of year was ice-cold. If the fall did not crush the spirit of any warm-blooded animal, the frozen water most certainly would.

The bridge, though slick in places, was still manageable. Rick told himself not to look down as he stepped over one missing board and then came to the space between boards through which the boar was giving him an angry look, squealing still, and snarling at him through his gritting teeth as he held onto the bird.

The ranger didn’t know what to do. He could cut the  bird loose from the ropes, and send the bird and the pig both crashing onto the rocks below and decided that, yes, before the cleanup crew arrived, that was what he would do. But first, more as a sentimental gesture than anything else, he wanted to touch the wild boar. Though he had come across a couple of dead boars in his lifetime, had scared a few from the brush, and had once even been chased back to his truck by one, he hadn’t ever touched a real live breathing wild boar in its, so to speak, natural habitat.

Rick got on his knees, seeing then that it not a he boar, after all, but a sow, a female. When he reached down through the space between missing boards, the pig in a wild swinging attempt of getting free of the ranger’s hand, threw the ranger himself through the opening of the bridge.

Rick was not a believing man. He did not believe in God. He believed in nature. He believed in cause and effect. He believed in survival of the fittest, even if a somewhat outdated model. He believed, too, in Bigfoot, but only because he had once seen him. 

But that would all change as he held onto the ribcage of the wild pig while hanging over the river through the better part of the next hour. It could not be said that he had the experience of God, per se, in those long minutes before the cleanup crew arrived, late by his calculations by twenty-five minutes, so much as an overwhelming feeling of connectedness as he had never quite experienced before.

He understood that the pig, too, was reconciling herself to this new understanding of the universe. As the ranger whispered and encouraged her to hang onto the bird, he could feel a communal warmth growing between them. It was the closest he had felt to any warm-blooded thing, ever, human or otherwise, in his forty-five years. He would finally understand this feeling, quite simply, as love.

And thus he hung for what felt like days, although it was probably only closer to forty-five minutes. He thought he could hear his game beeping from his iPad through the open window of his ranger truck, but that was impossible. It was too far away. And he could only image, finally, how it must have looked when the clean-up crew arrived.

“Hi, fellas!” he yelled. “I know this looks weird. But I can explain.”

What he could not explain, what he could never, for the rest of his life, explain, or forgive himself for, was that he belonged to a family of primates that would feel the need to kill a wild animal for their own protection, they said, and for his own, after helping Rick back to the bridge.

Rick spent his earlier years after the incident looking for the pig. He thought that she could have survived the fall, even if another part of himself knew how impossible this was. Although he could not bring himself to look, the echoey thudding sound of her body against the rocks below after she was cut loose were testament enough: that pig, the only female that he had ever truly loved, was dead.

206. I Googled: “What in the Hell Am I Always Searching For?”

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I clicked on the first search result, but the page could not be found. I refreshed the page and cleared my cookies, just in case, and learned, in the process, that I had somehow signed up for a Harry & David 12-Month Presidential Fruit-of-the-Month Club. I couldn’t figure out how to stop my membership, but rather than getting frustrated with myself for clearly being so technologically inept, I waited for my first order with great palatable expectation.

One day towards the end of the month when I still hadn’t received my fruit, I again googled: “What in the hell am I always searching for?” to check on my order. But I couldn’t find the original lost link. I clicked on the link for another search result, but the link was broken. As a result of my contact with these lost or broken links, apparently, or by my constant consumption of what was only, or so I’d been told, genetically modified SPAM, I caught a virus that took me down for days.

After I recovered, my girlfriend confronted me at breakfast one morning. I had a piece of bacon in my fingers and was lifting it to my mouth when she told me that she was concerned that I no longer loved her or found her attractive.

“Of course I find you attractive,” I told her. I took a bite of the bacon.

“But why, then, for three nights in a row,” she said, “has your device failed to make sync?”

“I’ve just been a little stressed.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that I’ve been stressed is all. Work has been stressful. It’s nothing more than that.”

What I couldn’t tell her, of course, was how I feared that I was becoming myself as realized by my machines. I feared that I was turning into a subhuman, or a supra-human, a technological beast. When I opened my mouth during the afternoon conference room meetings, for example, I tweeted—squawked, actually—yelped, brayed. I feared, furthermore, that my operating system was three or four updates behind. I felt slow. My pages loaded slowly. I couldn’t remember people’s names. I couldn’t remember my colleagues’ names, people I had worked with for years.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “You’re not even here. We’re in the middle of a conversation, and you drop the connection.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to be here. I’ll really try to connect.” And then I closed her down, temporarily, with one of my fantastically smug, all-purpose emoticons, so as to open another virtual page right there, in real time, and google across her forehead, “How do I slip out of this situation?”

203. Aliens Land in Their 63,360″ MacBook Pro Spaceship with Retina Display

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Usually when we came down from the iCloud and stepped off our ship, the crowd start yelling in explosive rage: “GO BACK WE DON’T WANT ANY OF YOUR KIND HERE YOU STUPID…” something, something, something, etc., etc., etc. 

We usually had sex with these creatures right there on the hard surface of the tarmac, in the pebbly rocks of their beaches, or in the corn fields with their scarecrows watching on, I kid you not, as a means of pleasure, yes, but also with a twofold purpose of shutting them up.

Don’t fuck with us. Don’t fuck with us or we will fuck you. That was the message, basically. I’m not saying that it is a good or conscionable thing. I’m not saying that we necessarily appreciated or approved of these military tactics. Our leader, Darth Steve Jobs, gave us commands from behind the curtain, and we followed these commands—blindly, yes, to a fault, but at least it was to a T. Conscionable we were not, perhaps, but detailed we were at the very least.

The strange thing, though, is this. When we got to the planet on the far reaches of our universe—Urt, they call it—on December 25, four days after our deadline of December 21, 2012, the people there were already plugged in. They welcomed us with bright lights, tinsel and gingerbread lattes. We only had to clear their cookies, feed them with SPAM and sync them up. The rest, as these Urt-lings like to say, is history.

140. Photo App Man

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photo-14We all noticed that something had been going well for him in his life. Without putting a finger on what it was, exactly, at first, some of us guessed that he had fallen in love or had received an inheritance from a rich and distant relative that he did not know that he had. The more religious-minded among us suspected that he had been born again. But whatever the case, we could not deny that he was looking good, very very good. Not only did we welcome it, this new look of his, therefore, but we embraced it. We celebrated it. We were attracted to it, and to him—to our eventual shame. He was cross-processed, in other words, but not necessarily in a bad way. He was all color-corrected and, for the first time, neatly cropped. How could we bear to look at him or even so much as think of him in any other way, without at least a little FX? Some warm color temperature here and sharpening there. Nip and tuck. Who could blame him, furthermore—or anyone, really, for that matter—for wanting to be red-eye reduced? The problem was, of course, that he could not leave well enough alone and, eventually, could not find his way back to his regular so-called life (or look). If only it was as simple sometimes as undo. But with his rainbow palette fantasy bokeh toy camera retro grunge stencil green high-saturated polarized poster haze hipster antique lomographic bubble-framed vivid color glow, most of us now agreed that he had gone too far.