136. No job for a Dentist

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.