I have had a mobile phone since the mid '90s. I have never used all the features on the
various phones I’ve owned as I seldom make more than two calls a week and very
few people ever seem to need to call me.
I rarely text anyone and I am irritated when I receive texts from people
who, it seems, can’t be bothered to talk to me.
Recently though, I have found three features of my
phone that have proved to be useful. One
is an app called “Find Friends” which I use to track Caroline on her journey
from work every day so that I can start cooking dinner as she enters the M1 and so is
thirty minutes from home.
Another
is Siri. My Siri installation is a
female Australian voice that
answers questions, make recommendations and supplies information. The first time I used Siri was outside a
barber during the schools’ half term holiday.
I had walked in and found that there were seven little boys in front of
me in the queue.
I went to sit in the car and asked Siri to find barbers. “I like your hair the way it
is,” she said. I thought that she was unnecessarily familiar.
Another app I use is a game called “4 pics 1
Word”. It displays four photographs which
are connected in some way and 12 letters are given to fit into a blank
grid. You might see pictures of a car, a
lorry, a bus and a cart. Below them will
be 7 empty boxes:
Below
those boxes are 12 letters:
H
|
I
|
E
|
Q
|
X
|
L
|
E
|
P
|
F
|
V
|
U
|
C
|
Once you
have solved it and put in V E H I C L E into the empty boxes, another set of
pictures and letters appear and on you go again.
Some of the connections are very obvious but early
on, when they were so easy that hardly any thought was required, I was stuck on
one for some time. The four photograph
boxes were just coloured red, blue, green and yellow. The empty grid needed 5 letters to fill
it. Eventually, I realised that the
solution was C O L O R. It’s
an American app.
I was sitting in the dentist’s waiting room one
morning a few days ago. I had arrived
early and passed the time playing the game while at the same time watching the
newly installed television that was showing the BBC news channel. A man who had arrived just after me asked the
receptionist to turn up the volume.
The photographs in the game I played were: a little girl
playing the piano; a man playing the violin; a man juggling three oranges and a
doctor using a stethoscope on a patient.
The missing word was 8 letters long and the letters given were:
E
|
A
|
S
|
N
|
T
|
R
|
P
|
C
|
C
|
O
|
A
|
I
|
After
five minutes I typed in P R A
C T I
S E. I was quite pleased with myself because I
thought that linking a doctor’s work with learning to play a musical instrument
was quite clever of me. But I was wrong.
Then I remembered that Americans don’t use PRACTISE
to spell the verb, and so I spelt it with two Cs. That was right.
I sat up straight and looked around the room feeling quite
pleased with myself. The hard-of-hearing
man was listening intently to the television where they were discussing the
forthcoming French Presidential election.
The game suddenly disappeared from my screen and a
pinging noise warned me that Siri was about to speak. She does that sometimes. She seems to pick up a background noise and
interpret it as words. When this
happens, her usual response is, “I didn’t quite catch that.”
This time, she wasn’t so diffident. She knew what she had heard.
“I have found these sites that can tell you about
erections.”
I was horrified.
The man with me in the waiting room had certainly heard it and he was looking at me, grinning.
I tried explaining to him that Siri must have
misheard “election” from the television discussion but he was laughing too much
to listen. The dental nurse came into
the room and called my name. I got up
and followed her.
“You need to see a doctor, not a dentist,” he suggested as I passed him.
