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I do not have pets or plants or anything else that would require watering, but I do have technology, and I treat my various technological gadgets like puppies and hamsters.
If you’re young, have a job, and live in a city, it’s hard enough to keep yourself alive. Trying to keep other living things alive would be impractical and ridiculous. One time my parents bought me a turtle, but it was too big and it’s aquarium was a huge hassle, so we returned it, and then another time, we accidentally cemented our cat, Misty, into the foundation of our garage and couldn’t find her for three days. We finally heard her crying under the plywood garage floor and busted her out of there with an ice pick. She had lost some weight and she was always skittish after that, like she’d come back from Vietnam or something. So one day I sat her down and had the following conversation with her:
Hey, Misty, why are you so skittish and reclusive all the time?
Oh. Right. The garage thing.
You really think it’s that big a deal though? It was only three days.
Whatever. Pussy.
Since living things can be temperamental, we increasingly replace them with wired things, and anthropomorphize the wired things as if they were the living things. Technology is the new pets.
Are the new pets. Technology are the new pets? Is the new pets. I’m not sure which.
I don’t mean that we’ve made robot pets or anything (Although we have. You can buy little silver dogs that waddle around and bark, and also, remember those little toys for girls that were supposed to be fed or something, and if they didn’t, they would die? Those toys recreated all the risk of having a real child without any of the rewards, like giggling and pudgy fingers. This is why people don’t love robots (and ironically, it’s our paucity of love that makes robots so dead-set on taking over the world and making us their slaves.))
So, no, I’m not talking about robots. I’m talking about naming your cell phone Mr. Blue Sparkles.
Mr. Blue Sparkles was my old Kyocera cell phone and he was called Mr. Blue Sparkles because he had a royal blue plastic cover with glitter, and he was a boy. I had him for like eight years and he was bigger than all the other cell phones and he had a long antenna that was good if you were bored and wanted to pretend to stab yourself in the stomach. It was also good for re-routing long range missiles (see my work in both Iraq wars. You know how we only hit 25% of our targets? That’s because I was on my phone 75% of the time.)
Mr. Blue Sparkles committed suicide a few months ago by jumping off my lap into a glass of water. He knew he had been missing too many of my calls, and felt bad about it, and knew I would never replace him as long as he still told me about some of my calls, and unselfishly wanted me to move on to something better. Well, if you call a navy blue and silver flip phone from Samsung with zero character “better,” then I guess I got it. But if Mr. Blue Sparkles could come back from the dead and whisper into my ear again, I’d take him back in a heartbeat. I wonder what he would whisper. Probably “Hi.” I guess it would depend on who’s calling though.
My new phone is equipped with T9Word, a program designed to make reading text messages ten times more difficult because everyone is always writing of instead of me. My phone thinks it can read minds, but it can’t. Like the other day, I was trying to write haven’t, but the phone thought I wanted to say guano.
There are three things that are weird about this:
Guano was completely out of context. Listen, T9Word, do you really think that I would text a friend to tell them that I haven’t heard from a different friend, and then, for no apparent reason, insert a reference to bat dung in the middle of a sentence? I don’t bat dung think so.
Needless to say, I thought the guano error was so egregious and hilarious that I made fun of my phone for days. I even developed an impersonation of my phone on a game show, constantly ringing in halfway through the host’s question and blurting Guano! every time.
TREBEK: This poet penned the famous phr– Yes, the phone is ringing in.
Um, um, GUANO!
TREBEK: No! Again, the answer is not guano. None of the answers are guano. Stop saying guano.
How does T9Word even know what guano is?
Obviously I hit a wrong key while trying to type haven’t, but I can’t get my phone to spell guano again. I think it’s embarrassed because I did the game show impersonation so much. Now it refuses to use the word guano in any context, even if the rest of the sentence is So I went to the bat museum yesterday, looked in the bat cage, took out my shovel, and scooped up a huge pile of ____. If I write that sentence in a text message, my phone pretends to believe that I want to scoop up a huge pile of Ivan.
What an idiot.
I also enjoy making fun of my phone when it tries to sound out a word it doesn’t know like it’s Billy Madison taking a spelling bee, or like when a girl you’ve been talking to for an hour asks if you know her name and you know it starts with a J, so you’re like, Jeeeeyooooooaaaaaaaa, until she says, “It’s Gloria,” and walks away.
When I try to get my phone to write anthropomorphism, it starts out all confident, but by the end of the word, it’s trying to slip in random letters, hoping that I won’t call it out. But, I always do.
Dude, anthropomorsigso is not a word.
Yes it is.
No it’s not. I wanted you to spell anthropomorphism.
Ohhhh. I see. I thought you wanted the Latin version.
That’s not the Latin version of anything. It’s just jabberwocky.
You mean jabbesyaly?
No.
(Okay, here’s my last comment about T9Word. Turn your phone on, spell coal, and see what it gives you for other options. If you don’t think that’s hilarious, there’s something wrong with you. Or you’re a girl. Girls don’t think that stuff’s funny for some reason.)
Technology has taken the place of pets because we spend so much time with it. We’re always connected. It’s changed the way we communicate and it’s changed the way we define “crazy.” Seven years ago, if I had caught myself doing an impersonation of my cell phone on Jeopardy I would have drank a bottle of cheap gin, hopped in a car, and plowed into a tree just so I could seek help at a Betty Ford clinic. But now I’m used to it.
Or take this example: Remember when you used to see a businessman on a street corner talking to himself and think, “Man, that guy looks successful, but he’s talking loudly to himself, so he must be crazy”? And then he would turn his head and you would see a wire dripping out of his ear and you would realize he was talking into a speaker on the wire, which was connected to his phone? And you’d be like, “Oh, I get it. He’s talking to somebody, probably selling bonds or ordering Lacoste polos.”
Now if I see a guy wearing winter boots, cutoff shorts, and a parka on a street corner in July, holding a brown paper bag in one hand, shaking his fist with the other, and drooling all over himself while he screams at a passing cloud, I think, “That guy must have Bluetooth.” Times have changed.
We spend so much time with our technology that it shouldn’t be surprising that we (or at least I) have begun naming it, talking to it, impersonating it, petting it, and taking it out for walks so it can sniff other technology. Last week my friend Heiny and I were exchanging files in a Barnes & Noble café using Bluetooth technology, and I remarked that our computers were kind of making out. Heiny has a silver PowerBook and I have a black MacBook so I was going to make a joke about our laptops being an interracial couple, but then I looked at the table next to us, and it was occupied by a black guy and a white girl, so I didn’t say anything. I emailed him the joke instead. Then we had a good laugh.
I spend more time with my MacBook than I do with any of my friends, which is sad, but when you consider that probably half of my friends only exist within my computer as email addresses, it kind of makes sense.
My real friends spend even more time in front of their computers than I do. A lot of them work on Wall Street. I always imagined them running around a trading floor, wearing suspenders, yelling at each other, and passing notes that said BUY or SELL or DO YOU LIKE ALLAN MORE THAN JUST A FRIEND? But apparently they stare at a computer screen for most of the day managing their fantasy football teams and worrying that the email I just sent them will get “flagged” because it mentioned drugs, Bush, intercourse, and airplanes in the same sentence.
You said you like to name your technology. Do you have a name for your computer?
No. Not yet.
How about Blacky MacLaptop?
I don’t think that’s gonna fly.
Oh, it’ll fly. It’ll fly like a flock of penguins with jetpacks.
With jetpacks?
Yeah. Penguins can’t fly without jetpacks.
Do jetpacks even exist?
I don’t know.
You would think they would at this point. I mean, with all the other technological advances we’ve seen in our lifetimes…
You’re absolutely right. It’s just a jetpack. Hey, NASA, take a Jansport backpack, put a fricking rocket in it, and see what happens. You know? How hard is that?
It’s not hard.
Exactly.
See? Technology has come so far that we’re surprised not tohave jetpacks. But maybe it’s a good thing. Jetpacks would represent one more thing to name, one more thing to pet, and one more thing to subject to anthropomorphism.
You mean anthropomorsigso?
No.
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