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.