Another Day in the Country
First you have to say it right
© Another Day in the Country
If you’ve been reading this column for any length of time, you know that one of the things I dislike intensely is talking to machines. Maybe it’s a generational thing.
I’ve been known to talk to myself on occasion. I talk to my cat, Skeeter. Sometimes, I just use hand signals and body language, and she understands. That’s better than some people I know.
I talk to the ducks. We’ve come to an understanding. I call, and if I have peas in my hand, they go back into their pen. It’s a pretty simple agreement.
The ducks even talk back to me. At night, when I’m locking the back door, I can call out to them, “Duck, ducks, are you OK?” and when they hear my voice, they answer. That’s pretty good. They also respond to the back door opening, so it’s not just my voice.
Come to think of it, I worked with my kids when they were little to answer when I called, and it took them quite a while to become consistent. Maybe I should have tried peas.
I refuse to talk to my car. I don’t talk to my television set although it constantly tries to get me to call out a requisite name. I won’t. I don’t. I can find programs to watch myself, thank you. I am intimately acquainted with the clicker and know how it works.
And now it’s my phone that’s wanting to become my go-to person.
Already I go to Google for answers to a lot of puzzling questions. I’ve typed in questions recently like, “Proper wound care,” when I thought I already knew the answer. I’ve asked it to “spell connoisseur” when I couldn’t find a dictionary. I wrote, “recipe for apple pie,” when I was looking for something new and different from my old Betty Crocker cookbook and was suddenly swamped with a plethora of apples.
So far, I’ve drawn the line at speaking to an invisible synthetic voice — except for generated voices on answering machines or when I have to speak to a robot when dialing a business number. Still, it infuriates me.
Then I needed to get a new iPhone and listened to my sister setting up voice activation on hers, choosing the voice she wanted to have answer — a woman, a man, someone with an English accent. There were lots of options.
“This will come in handy,” Jess said gleefully. “I can dictate to my phone when I’m driving. I can ask for help finding something, I can even tell them to call you!”
She laughed. I made a face.
While we were out galivanting around with my California family in tow, I heard her talking to her phone on several occasions, and it seemed helpful.
I thought, “C’mon, Pat Wick, get with the program, Try something new. Don’t be so stubborn. Experiment. Be brave.”
I said out loud to my daughter, “Maybe I should try that ‘series’ thing.”
“Well, for starters,” my daughter quipped, “you have to learn how to pronounce her name right!”
Everyone laughed. And, of course, I was scrambling for a pen and pencil to write that down because there might be a column in that interaction. You have to constantly be on the lookout for column material when you’ve written one as long as I have!
One day, on the way to Salina, my grandson read, “4 miles to Kipp.” He was reading a marker beside the road.
“What’s Kipp?” he wanted to know.
“It’s just a wide spot in the road,” I answered.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
Well, there’s a generation gap right there!
“It’s a really small town,” I explained.
Then I Googled the phrase, and in the description, it included the word “insignificant.” But if it’s your hometown, that would seem like an insult.
“Kipp, Kansas,” my grandson chanted. “I’d like to be from Kipp, Kansas. It has a nice ring to it.”
“Where are you from?” he continued on a roll, chuckling while imitating some posh voice. “I’m from Kipp, Kansas.”
Then he added, “Baba, we need to go there, just not today.”
We’d been running errands for most of the day already, and he wanted to get back home to Ramona.
Speaking of galivanting, my grandson — at my request — made a list of things he’d like to do while in Ramona. He included “see Coronado Heights” on his list along with “Visit Kipp.”
So, on my birthday, the day before they were leaving, after we’d gone out for breakfast, visited Coronado Heights, and taken pictures, we went to Kipp, saw old-time elevators, a couple of lovely homes, some high weeds, and some messy yards.
We climbed out of the car in the middle of the road — there was no traffic — propped the camera on the hood of the car, and posed for a picture in front of those old elevators in Kipp, Kansas, on another day in the Kountry.