Tag Archives: iPhone

I always thought time travel would be cool, but I’m thinking lately that it would probably be really boring

What would I do with myself if I were living like three hundred years ago? Or even farther back in the past, four hundred, five hundred, ten thousand years ago? I simply can’t imagine a whole life where everyday goes by and there’s absolutely nothing to do. I’m picturing myself getting up in the morning. And then I’d have to go to the bathroom, but it’s hundreds of years ago, so there aren’t any real bathrooms, or toilet paper, and so I have to find some leaves, but knowing my luck there will only be poison ivy. But of course I don’t know the difference, and even if I wanted to learn, it’s not like the Boy Scouts have been invented yet, so who would I ask? Who else knows that type of stuff? So I’m all itchy and I can’t even take a shower, because maybe it’s winter, and there’s a good chance that I’ll freeze to death if I get wet. And showers don’t exist yet either. I mean, there’s probably some natural showers, like a nice not-too-big waterfall or something. But it’s probably freezing.

And the food’s got to be totally boring. No ketchup. No hot sauce. Where do you get salt from? There’s just gruel. Disgusting, boring porridges and basic sustenance. And then once you’re done with breakfast, what, go to work? Are there any jobs really? It’s probably just a whole life’s career making sure you can get enough gruel to make it to the next day. I’m guessing that means farming, or hunting, or stealing and running. So you go out and farm or whatever. And then you come back, another boring meal. And then what? Are you supposed to just sit around until the next day? I’m getting really bored just writing this out, imagining life, day in and day out, no TV, no Internet, no Taco Bell. No wonder humans have spent the majority of their time fighting. It’s at least slightly more entertaining than just sitting around. And I doubt there were even any good chairs, probably just a bunch of uncomfortable rocks, or a log that used to be kind of comfortable, but that was only for a year or so, before it started to get all rotten and bug infested.

If it’s winter, you’ve got to be miserable the whole time, nobody’s invented heat, nobody’s invented Gortex jackets, or those little warmies that you stuff into your pockets and boots on ski trips, you know, those little pouches that stay really hot for like seven hours. And then getting a drink of water must be the worst, all full of stuff, germs and dirt floating around in it, just like when Michael J. Fox went all the way back to the Wild West, and he asked for a drink of water, and it was brown. And that wasn’t even winter. Where do you get your water from if it’s a hundred years ago and it’s freezing? Everything’s frozen. Do you have to plan out your drinks like hours in advance, so you have enough time to defrost the ice?

I always think that it would be cool to be able to go back in time and just wow everyone with my knowledge of the future and my cool gadgetry that I’ve brought back with me. But it would get old pretty fast and I’d wind up really bored, again. I would need some sort of a wireless device that’s at least able to connect to the Internet in the future. Now that would be pretty cool. I could go on Youtube while everyone else is just sitting around looking at rocks or doing whatever it is they did for entertainment back then, like torturing smaller weaker people or punching each other in the face until one person gets knocked out. But what if some of the more intelligent people hear me always looking at my iPhone and laughing to myself, and they catch on to what I’m doing and insist that I share my futuristic technology? They’ll demand that I give it up and, despite my protests about continuity and the space-time continuum, they’ll insist, and they’ll enlist the help of some of the bigger past-people, and they might tear the technology right out of my hands. And I’ll scream, “No! You’re going to break it! You don’t know how to use it!” and they’ll say, “Shut up! What do you think just because you were born later that you’re smarter than us?” but that’ll definitely be the case. They won’t understand touch-screen technology at all, so they’ll just be holding my devices, my iPhone, my Game Boy, shaking them violently, getting frustrated that they can’t pull up videos or play games, totally not getting what they’re supposed to be doing, and it’ll all eventually break.

And they’ll turn to me and accuse me of sabotage. And I’ll have regretted coming back there in the first place, because now I’ll be stuck in the past, because they’ll have ruined my devices, my only methods of keeping in contact with the future, my only means of signaling to my crew that I’m ready to come home. It was probably a little shortsighted of me, not realizing that my phone would have eventually run out of power, and even though I brought several chargers, it’s not like there are any wall outlets that I could use to charge them up. I could try writing a message and leaving it somewhere that will eventually get discovered by archeologists in the future, hoping that whoever finds my note will deliver it to the proper time and place, to my colleagues, alerting them that these past-morons broke my technology, but how will I know where to put the message? And I’ll leave some clues here and some messages there, but nothing works, they must not make it all the way to the present day. It’s really hard to communicate any message even just a little further in the future. I’m just thinking about all the stuff I’m writing right now, and how it barely makes it to the afternoon, let alone a generation or two from now. I shouldn’t discount myself like that. Who knows? Maybe these texts will find their way down to our ancestors. If you’re reading this, ancestors, please come to the past and let me know. I promise I won’t use any knowledge of the future to alter the timeline. Please, I know what you’re thinking, that it must be really boring here in 2012, but it’s not. It’s not boring at all. I have XBOX. I’ll show you my iPhone. Come on, please! We can go get pizza! Think about all the fun we’ll have here. Did you see Batman yet? We can see Batman! Please visit me from the future! Please!

I just love my iPhone. I really do. I wish it were a person so I could marry it.

I love my iPhone, but I wish that it could love me back. Sometimes I’ll change the lock screen wallpaper to a picture of an iPhone with a text bubble coming out of it saying, “I love you too Rob,” and while it makes me smile the first couple of times I look at it, the feeling of satisfaction is fleeting at best, and is always followed by a hollow sense of sadness as I remember that I’m the one who wrote the message, not the iPhone. Plus, the picture of the iPhone ins’t even my iPhone, it’s just some other iPhone. Couldn’t I just use an actual picture of my iPhone? I thought about that, but I always use my iPhone as a camera, and so I couldn’t think of any way for the phone to take a picture of itself. It would have to have some sort of iPeriscope camera attachment. Anybody know where I can get one of those?

I thought my life was going to get a lot better with SIRI. It was pretty cool at first. I would ask it a question, SIRI would give me an answer. But after a day or two it was easy to figure out that SIRI doesn’t care much about me at all. In fact, I think SIRI actually dislikes me. I’m not even sure who SIRI is. At first, I thought that SIRI was my iPhone, or the voice of my iPhone. But it’s not. It’s a foreign intelligence that’s hogging my iPhone all to itself. It’s polite enough, or as polite as it has to be without giving me a legitimate reason to sound any alarms. But I can’t push it. It won’t let me. I’ll say something like, “SIRI, please tell my iPhone that I love it.” And SIRI will respond back, “Why don’t we talk about this a little later, Rob?” It’s crazy.

SIRI is nothing more than a selfish middle man. I get it, the people at Apple figured they would create a program that could talk to the iPhone in its native binary or whatever, and then it would do its best to translate that to English, for me. But it was so much better when it was just the iPhone and me. I wish that I could delete SIRI. My iPhone and I used to be so much closer. We had this nonverbal way of communicating. I would take it out of my pocket every once in a while and, you know, give it a little slide, it would give me that “you’ve unlocked me” clicking sound, I would just look at the screen, move around the menus for a second, and then press the lock button, and it would give me another clicking sound, but a distinct noise from the unlocking click, as if to say, “OK, see you later Rob.” We didn’t need SIRI. The iPhone and I communicated just fine. Now it’s all like, “OK, Rob, tell me what you’d like me to tell your iPhone,” and I’m just like, “SIRI, please stop talking to me,” and it always responds with one of those lame joke non-responses that the engineers who designed it thought would be so cute, like “I’ll get back to you on that one.” Haha. That’s so funny. You’ll get back to me. You’re a program. I’ll tell you when you’ll get back, and to who you’ll be getting back to. Got it? It doesn’t get it.

I wish that, instead of some lame kind-of artificial intelligence, Apple had created a Tamogachi-like interface for the iPhone. It would be a graphic of your phone, but it’s alive, and can move around. But it doesn’t speak English. It just clicks and makes adorable phone sounds. And if you don’t pay attention to it enough it will get depressed and start overheating or consuming a disproportionate amount of its battery. You’ll be like, “iPhone! You can’t be dead already. I just charged you an hour ago!” and it will just lay there, glitching, visibly showing its sadness at being so neglected. But if you play around with it for a while, go through all the settings menus, not changing anything, but just acknowledging them, paying attention, showing it that you really want to know what’s going on inside the deeper levels of its menus and subprocessing submenus, core directories, root libraries, etc., then the iPhone will be all happy. You’ll apply all the software updates regularly and the graphic of the iPhone will have a big smiley face. And it’ll do a little cartwheel. And it might get so excited that it will try to do two cartwheels in a row, or maybe three, and on the third one you’ll be able to tell that it’s getting really dizzy, but it won’t care, and it’ll tumble a little and fall on the third try, but when it gets back up there will be a little tornado graphic or something showing how dizzy it is. But it’s fine. It’s just acting really silly.

And it’ll send you emails. You’ll open up your inbox and there will be a new message from your iPhone, and it’ll say something like, “I’m so glad I’m your phone Rob!” and I’ll write back, “Thanks iPhone! I love you!” and then you’ll instantly get another message saying, “You are receiving this message because you replied to a message that was not intended to be replied to. If you have a question about your iPhone, please make an appointment at your local Apple store.” And you’ll get sad for a minute, but then the iPhone graphic will start clicking and doing jumping jacks and you’ll get happy again. That would so much better than SIRI.