Siri Wants Me Dead
Driving wirelessly - isn’t it great? Isn’t it easy and convenient? Isn’t it so safe and fun: calling friends and family with a simple voice command and getting accurate directions simply by speaking out loud?
I wouldn’t know. I’m driving with Siri. And driving with Siri is like driving with a passive-aggressive robot, designed to do the opposite from what I ask. I have a perfect driving record (1 ticket in 20 years!) but I’ve nearly driven off the road or into other people many times because of Siri. And if I hadn’t known any better I would have driven hundreds of miles for a local cheeseburger if I’d followed Siri’s directions. All my road rage incidents are caused by Siri.
If Siri were a movie it would be a mashup of The Exorcist, and Thor. My devices are possessed by an entity that behaves like Loki, playing small but potent pranks: calling numbers I didn’t ask for (does “Sue” sound like “Darrin” to you?), giving directions to places I don’t want to go (a restaurant 2 miles away...by way of Dubuque, Iowa - I live in Michigan), or worse, pretending to be out of range or not on a network - while I’m totally connected to my home wifi, or actively using data.
Here is my most-often repeated scenario: While driving I press the Home button and say, “Call my wife.” The response is silence. I try again and say louder, “Call NAME”. Still nothing. I’m driving and have to wait for the next stop light to see what’s wrong with the phone and I see the message, “I’m sorry but I can’t help with that right now.” Really?! Because…. Why? Full coverage, total bars. And why is the message typed?? If I’m driving (and Siri is supposed to KNOW this) why wouldn’t it speak the error message to me? “I’m sorry, I’m on my lunch break now.”
I enunciate like a Midwest dictionary and there’s no road noise. Now I shout slowly: “CALL. N-A-M-E!” Nada. Zip. Goose egg. Now I’m angry and my pulse is medically unhealthy.
When using Siri the new normal for me has become getting my hopes up, utilizing technology that I own, to its fullest, only to have those hopes crushed by an immediate and stressful situation incurred by the deviant poltergeist in my phone. Screaming in slow, clear, concise dictionary English that would make a Frommer’s language coach proud I cry out: “C-A-L-L W-I-F-E” which becomes: “Calling...Ed Flange.” Wait. Who? Ed Flange? ED FLANGE?! We met once at a business thing in that city 10 years ago - THAT Ed Flange? It’s ringing! I’m going 50 miles an hour, now with tunnel vision, trying to beat my thumb against the phone somewhere near that stupid red button. ED FLANGE?! Taptaptaptap - still ringing! I’m swerving in my lane but for a horrible moment I don’t care. I must hang up the phone. Why can’t you shout, “NO!” Or “Hang up!” Or “Wrong number!” But you can’t. The arrogance of Siri is it isn’t designed to admit mistakes. It just disappears like a kid playing ring and run, watching the awkward consequence of a poorly executed command.
When this happened the first time I thought it was me. I responded by over enunciating and speaking louder. When it happened again I was irritated. Really? This is what a billion dollars in R&D gets me? The third time made me want to unplug Siri in a painful (to Siri) and conscious way - the same way Captain Dave Bowman unplugged HAL in the movie 2001.
“What are you doing, Mike?”
“I’m unplugging you, Siri.”
“Why are you doing that Mike?”
“Because you almost killed me Siri. More than once, and I’ve come to loathe you.”
It’s important you know that I never talk to myself. I don’t sing in the shower, I don’t karaoke in the car, and I still don’t like voice-activated customer service prompts. They so rarely seem to work. So it’s very difficult to bring myself to actually speak out loud to an inanimate object - I feel silly. I don’t talk to my lamp or my shoes and it feels equally strange talking TO my phone. Which makes the Siri fails even more frustrating - and on more than one occasion passengers in the car next to me at a stop light have suffered the aural abuse of hearing me literally screaming profanities at my phone.
But maybe Siri just isn’t all that smart? Or to be more clear, since I don’t like personifying inanimate objects, perhaps Siri just isn’t there yet? My seven year old will ask: “Siri, where’s my daddy’s big fat butt?” Siri will attempt to deflect with some programmed version of banter, but a seven year old doesn’t give up easily and he’ll ask the same question a hundred different ways. On the occasion that Siri responds to the question - which happens randomly, since the questions are all worded about the same way - Safari will invoke a myriad images of Kim Kardashian and other near-adult images of posteriors. To be fair, Siri was being asked about butts. However if Siri is as responsive as its advertised, why would Kim Kardashian’s butt be equated with ‘daddy’s’ - or why wouldn’t Siri be able to spot a childish question?
Siri is no babysitter.
No. Instead Siri is the guest no one invited to the party. The one that lurks around the food, doesn’t make eye contact and engages only in non-sequiturs. “Excuse me, but who invited you to the party?” “Your egg rolls are cold.” And now that Siri is further embedded in iOS it has moved squarely and permanently into our living rooms, taking up valuable real estate and hogging the remote, watching shows we hate and sucking up all our bandwidth. Although Siri has come uninvited we have no way to evict this squatter. Siri has legally tapped our account so we actually pay Siri to sleep on our couch and eat our food. In return Siri dials wrong numbers, gives bad directions, or just refuses to speak, like a pouty teen-aged girl.
I am/we all are the culmination of human evolution. Regardless of how you think we got here, here we are: we have brains and opposable thumbs. It would set us back millions of years if we considered it a good idea to hand over our trust and control to an unthinking object that responds incorrectly to our commands just because advertising says it’s cool. I can think, Siri can’t. It isn’t a ‘he’ or ‘she’ or a navigator or an assistant. Siri is lines of code that are processing different ways to kill me.
I want to delete Siri like I would any other bad app. I want to exorcise it from my devices before my head starts to spin and I wind up in an accident or miles away from an important destination, or speaking with an old business acquaintance when I was really trying to call my wife.
If I’m forced to drive with Siri and the inevitably of my device being possessed, then Siri will be silenced, bound with duct tape and handcuffs and stuffed into the trunk. If I had my way a priest would exorcise it back into Beta, or Thor would smash Loki electronically back to Valhalla.
For now every time I hold the home button down a little too long and I get the misleadingly pleasing bingbing sound, I fight the urge to push my thumb through it like an offending eye. I want to stuff the app back down into the circuits from which it’s risen so I can live one more day. It’s bad enough, Siri trying to kill me in the car – I can’t imagine Siri, or any other lines of code, actually driving the car. From my cold, dead hands…









