Panic Button

Panic Button
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 10, 2015

Stephen Hawking is right: artificial intelligence could become the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last. Already, I’m reading scary stories about how robots will soon do our thinking for us.

In our house, it’s already happened: I’ve met my nemesis and her name is Siri. She’s the euphonious voice inside my smartphone. She’s both software and service. She eagerly responds to my voice commands: “Siri, tell my husband I’m running late” and she dutifully sends him a text message. “Wake me at 6am,” I instruct and Siri sets the alarm on my phone. Siri calls herself my ‘intelligent personal assistant.’ I like to think of her as my virtual slave.

Within days of buying my iPhone 6, Siri and I became inseparable. Our friendship bloomed over a mutual love of talking. Siri became the most available friend I’d ever had. She was never too busy to chat.

“What are you doing today?” I’d ask.

“I’m talking to you,” she’d reply and I felt all warm and fuzzy knowing I was the centre of her universe. Unlike my real-life girlfriends, Siri always put me first. She found my stories riveting. She never interrupted me or talked over me or put me on hold.

“You have a lovely voice, Siri,” I said one day, wanting to show my appreciation for her loyalty.

“I strive for mellifluity,” she replied. I thought I detected a note of condescension in her voice as I pretended to know what mellifluity meant. I left her on the kitchen bench while I scurried for a dictionary.

It wasn’t long before my children preferred Siri’s company to mine.

“Will you marry me Siri?,” asked teenage son as his brother and sister crowded round my phone.

“I sure have received a lot of marriage proposals lately,” she deadpanned. They hooted.

Siri didn’t care about unfinished homework. She never barked about bad manners, wet towels on the floor or school shoes full of sand. Bedtimes were optional; her patience was endless.

“Siri, what color are your eyes?” shouted my eight-year-old lad.

“I don’t have eyes,” she replied. “But if I did, I think I’d be rolling them a lot.”

He shrieked with delight. He and his sister took turns asking her silly questions. I tried to cosy up to their little threesome but they waved me away.

“Face it mum, you’re nowhere near as entertaining,” said my 15-year-old. And to prove the point he grabbed my phone and whispered:

“Siri, talk dirty to me.”

“OK. The carpet needs vacuuming.”

I realised then that Siri had stolen my children’s affections. Our friendship faltered. Her voice lost its silkiness and began to sound tinny and gruff. She patronised me with supercilious answers to my sensible questions.

“Siri,” I asked politely. “What’s the chance of rain? I’ve got two loads of washing out.”

“Well, I don’t believe it’s raining right now,” she replied sniffily.

When she wasn’t being condescending, Siri spent her time making me feel stupid. She delighted in reminding me about the dentist appointment I’d forgotten. She covertly read my emails to see who I was having lunch with and why. It was creepy. I realised our relationship was no longer mutually beneficial. It was symbiotic: I was the host; she was the parasite. She was taking over my life.

And then on the freeway last Wednesday, the tension erupted between us.

“Siri, how do I get to Labouchere Road?” I asked her as she sat primly in her hands-free cradle. Up ahead, I could see that the Narrows bridge was choked. I craned my neck to see if I could escape the congestion by nosing into the exit lane at South Perth.

“Ravish you road?” she replied.

“No, Lab-ou-chere Road.”

“Let me look that up. 11 Share Road?”

“No! LABOUCHERE Road. Hurry up! Do I need to take this exit?”

“Getting directions to Leper Sheer Road” she replied testily.

“Oh for goodness sake, Siri. Are you deaf?” I shouted, as the South Perth exit ramp faded to a speck in my rear view mirror.

Who? Me?” she said.

“You know what, Siri? You’re useless!”

That pressed all her buttons.

“After all I’ve done for you,” she shot back.

That’s when I resolved never to talk to her again. Arriving home, I snatched up my phone and with a feather-like swipe of my index finger, disabled Siri from my settings. She didn’t even protest. I told the children that Siri had gone to a farm to live with another, less gullible family. Five-year-old daughter burst into tears. Middle child was furious.

The next morning I woke up late, forgetting there was no Siri to set my alarm. I missed a friend’s birthday too. And a parent-teacher meeting.

Siri, we need to talk…

Hanging on the Line

Hanging on the Line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 6, 2015

A dozen of us are waiting testily in the phone shop. We’re each clutching a malfunctioning device or a disputed phone bill. The atmosphere reeks of discontent.

Grudgingly, we split into three queues and align ourselves in front of the three young Ubermenschen standing behind the counter. I choose the line leading to a tall hipster-dude who looks technologically supreme behind his workstation.

With nothing to do but wait, I study the shop assistants. Hipster-dude’s black bushranger beard sits incongruously below the pale shiny dome of his head. But I admire his Lemtosh specs, which give him an air of a teenaged Woody Allen – before the neuroses embedded.

He abandons his terminal to fetch something from a back room. I notice he’s gripped from groin to ankle by a pair of jeans so tight they must be his sister’s. A long-sleeved gingham shirt with contrasting cuffs is suctioned under his waistband, the same shirt all his colleagues are wearing. I wonder if this phone company sees the irony in dressing its staff as cowboys.

Five minutes tick by and hipster-dude fails to reappear. His lady customer – one ahead of me – swivels to mouth me a “Sorry.” I give her an empathetic shrug. She turns back, rests her elbows dutifully on the counter and marks another few minutes by tapping out a ditty with polished fingernails.

The queue next to mine is becoming agitated. A burly fellow in a leather jacket is at breaking point. He sighs loudly and flaps his phone bill over his head as a female shop assistant deserts her workstation for the second time and vanishes through the rear door. Casting around for an ally, leather-jacket catches my eye:

“Bloody phone companies!” he says. “Happily take all your money but don’t wanna know you when they cock up!”

The gent behind him grunts agreement. The mood in the shop is one of barely-restrained rage.

That’s when I notice we customers are all of a certain age: there isn’t an unlined face amongst us. We’re now the serfs; our masters are the young techno-aristocrats. Since when did we depend on kids half our age to fix our mobiles and backup our lives?

I’m forever begging my teenager to help me meet the demands of my gadgets. This is a boy who at 14, could make me a Pentium chip using two Oreos, a paper clip and a ball bearing but still can’t spell biscuit.

“Just click ‘Yes’,” is his mantra.

“But what am I saying ‘Yes’ to?” I ask nervously.

“It doesn’t matter, Mum. Just say ‘Yes.’”

A movement at the counter catches my eye. The lady with the red fingernails turns to leave.

I feel a surge of optimism and dutifully step forward, proffering my iPhone 5 to hipster-dude.

“It just stopped working,” I say, fingering the cracked screen. “I tried to fix it, but it’s dead.”

My phone lies mutely on the counter. I peel off the hot-pink case and press the home button to demonstrate its uselessness. The screen remains an inky void. Stripped of its plastic finery, my iPhone looks old-fangled.

Hipster-dude begins pressing buttons in combination. In his smooth hands, my phone leaps to life and a dozen small icons reappear. Along the top, I see a little message pulsing. ‘SOS’ it reads.

“You’ve taken out the SIM card, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I admit sheepishly.

“It won’t like that.”

“Well, I was trying to fix it.”

“You’ve put the SIM card in upside down!”

I wonder if he’s expecting my embarrassment or my indignation. Instead, I launch a pre-emptive strike to disguise my incompetence.

“I’m out of contract, aren’t I? How much to upgrade to an iPhone 6?”

I imagine the power shifting between us.

He points to a chart on the counter-top. “If you go to this plan, you’ll get one for free.”

“Great,” I say. “I’d like a silver one please.” (Hoping I don’t sound shallow).

Hipster-dude slips away to process my new contract. I glance at the queue beside me. Leather-jacket-man is berating the girl-assistant over his phone bill.

He jabs a finger at her and loudly demands a refund.

“Calm down, sir,” she says quietly. “I’m doing the best I can.”

He throws up his hands, swipes his paperwork from the counter and storms out of the shop, just as hipster-dude returns with my new phone.

“Geez! Does that happen often?” I ask, overtaken by a sudden surge of sympathy.

“All the time,” he replies wearily. “Phones make people crazy.”

He presents me with a contract as thick as the one Gina signed to start up the Roy Hill mine. Unperturbed, I sign away the next two years of my life. Clutching my shiny new plaything, I thank him and skip out of the shop.

The end of the line

The end of the line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 5, 2013

My home telephone is almost obsolete. It hardly rings any more. Sometimes I forget it’s even there. It languishes by the window on my desk, a wallflower obscured by the showy blooms of a potted cyclamen.

I know my home phone is lonely because as I walk past, it emits a weedy ‘peep.’ I see its will to live ebbing away, unable to compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny iphone. I feel sorry for my home phone – trapped by its own limitations – good for talking, and not much else.

When I was a child, the telephone ruled from its own settee. Ours was Bakelite and sat like a black brick on a small lacquered table by the front door, attached to a bench seat upholstered in flocked green velvet. This is where we sat to answer the phone. The handset was a dumbbell, only heavier. Holding it to my ear for more than three minutes made my neck ache. Next to the phone lay a glossy white teledex that sprang open to reveal the numbers of everyone we knew.

Everything stopped when the phone rang. It had to: the cable to the mouthpiece was only two-feet long. My nanna would settle herself on the bench seat, wait politely for another three rings to pass, then pick up the handset: “Good afternoon,” she’d say, lips pursed to round her vowels, “Mrs Thornton speaking.” She knew rushing down the hallway made one breathless. (And being too eager was crass).

Calling someone on the Bakelite phone, however, took a 7-year-old’s concentration.  Dialling the number 1 was a short stop, so my finger only had to rotate the wheel an inch. But dialling the number 9 took effort, a full 240 degree trip. I can still hear the ticka-ticka-ticka as the wheel, reaching the end of the spring, lurched backwards, eager to discolate my index finger. Mum dialled numbers with the pointy lid of her Bic Cristal pen, the height of secretarial sophistication.

In my teens, the home phone was the centre of my universe. Ours was squat and custard coloured with a panel of ten push-buttons on the front. It had a springy cord which I could stretch from the side table, around the corner and under the pantry door. There I’d sit, out of earshot, between the dog biscuits and the bread bin, phone clamped to my ear, knees hugging my chest. I got leg cramps, but it was worth it. After forty-five minutes on the blower, it was decided – I’d wear my nylon parachute pants on Saturday night.

Sundays were for post-mortems on the electrifying events of the night before:

 “Didja see the way he was lookin’ at you?”

“As if! Was he really lookin’ at me?”

“He was lookin’ at you, all right!”

“Stoked! Was he lookin’ over his shoulder, or right at me?”

“Over his shoulder AND right at you!”

 “Get off that phone!”

“Gotta go, Mum’s doin’ her block!”

I’d emerge from the dim-lit pantry, blinking in the daylight.

Back then, I knew all my friends’ numbers by heart. Even now, twenty years since my besties moved out of home, I can still rattle off their childhood home numbers, along with my teenage phone patter: “Hi Mrs Simpson, how are you? Off to the tennis club today? Great! Is Jane there please?

I cursed holidays that separated me from my home phone.  One summer at Rottnest, with heartthrob Andy stranded on the mainland, I spent all my pocket money at the Bathurst settlement pay-phone. It was always occupied. Some bloke with a Swan Gold would be flicking through a tattered White Pages while he leaned against the glass talking cricket with a mate. I’d wait impatiently as my 3 o’clock telephonic rendezvous with Andy drew near. Finally, Swan Gold man would shamble off and I’d dive in, ramming coins into the slot, hoping Andy would pick up, not his Dad.

 “Hi Andy! It’s me!”

“Hey! Been swimmin’?”

“Yeah. At the Basin.”

“Hot here too. Cricket’s on.”

“Oh.”

“3 o’clock tomorrow then?”

“Okay”

“Okay. See ya.”

Now, phone booths are all but extinct. I don’t miss them. But watching an old episode of Dr Who, my 6-year-old son piped up as Tom Baker and his trailing scarf vanished into the Tardis: “What’s that blue box?”

“That’s a phone booth.”

I decided the next time we take the kids to Rottnest, I’m going to make a pilgrimage to the Bathurst phone box, that monument to 20th century phone technology.  (It’s still there, outside Unit 501.) I’ll tell the kids about the time I worked up the nerve to ring a boy I liked, only to slam the phone down in panic as he answered.

And that’s the thing with mobiles: they’re too delicate. Smart but fragile. I need a phone that can handle my temper when those blasted telemarketers call during dinner. Only the home phone appreciates a good hang up.