One of my favorite comic strips, Tim Rickard's Brewster Rockit, has noted that our increasingly ubiquitous digital assistants, like Siri and Alexa, are apparently all female, and has asked the question, what if the personal assistant were male instead? Hilarity, or at least some cleverly recycled jokes, followed:
Yesterday's installment poked fun at 'mansplaining':
Mansplaining, for any of you who might not know, is... wait... I'm walking right into that one, aren't I?
Anyway, at the Curmudgeon home, we don't have Siri or Alexa. The whole idea of one of these 'listening' constantly, waiting to be of service, just creeps me out. And Long Suffering Spouse completely agrees with me on this. Besides, she doesn't need Siri or Alexa. She has me.
My wife's relationship with technology (as they used to say on Facebook) is 'complicated.' She must use it every day at school and, usually, long into the night at home (on schoolwork). During the total lockdown phase of our never-ending Pandemic she had to master a host of new apps -- Google Classroom may have been the biggest, but there were several plug-ins that she needed to learn, too. And, for whatever reason, just as in every other trade or profession, apps and programs for teachers are constantly being 'updated' (which usually means 'made worse'). At best, new software means learning new commands and orders of operation because why leave well enough alone?
I think software programmers must have a sadistic streak. Some, anyway.
But my wife copes with these -- not without complaint, mind you, but she copes. And learns. And manages.
However, my wife also can not turn on the TV. If the TV is on, she can not change the channel. And she has no concept of whether a program is on the satellite dish (for the moment, until I get around to it, we remain DirecTV subscribers) or streamed on Roku. And during the height of the Pandemic, when the faithful were not allowed to attend the Mass in person, we watched the services from our home parish via Twitch. Which involves changing plug-ins. Long Suffering Spouse was never going to do that.
So it has become my job to operate the TV. And in the sense that, maybe sometimes, it takes quite a while for me to find a program I am willing to watch, today's Brewster Rockit hits sort of close to home:
Actually, I also had TV operational responsibilities in my youth.
When my folks moved to Boondockia, in the late 60s, the National Football League still blacked out home football games in a team's home market. That meant if the Bears were playing at home, the game would not be broadcast in Chicago. But Rockford had its own TV stations, of the low-powered UHF variety, but still. And Rockford was only a little further from Boondockia than was Chicago, albeit west instead of southeast, and the Rockford stations were permitted to carry all the Bears games, home and away.
As a South Sider, my father grew up a fan of the Chicago Cardinals. The Cardinals left Chicago in the late 1950s (first for St. Louis, later for Arizona). The Bears' owner, George Halas, was widely blamed, among Cardinals fans, for driving their team out of town. I am sure some Chicago football fans transferred their allegiance from the departing Cardinals to the remaining Bears as a matter of course, but my father was not one of these. It took me years to figure out why, but we watched an awful lot of American Football League games back when I was a little kid. (If you even skim the Archives here, you will find many examples of how I've been equally slow on the uptake in a variety of other matters.)
I don't know what ultimately softened my father's attitude toward the Bears. Maybe it was the heroics of ex-Bear George Blanda for the Oakland Raiders. Blanda was still an effective QB for the Raiders well into his 40s, albeit only in limited action, mostly late in games, if Daryle Lamonica was injured or ineffective. Blanda was Tom Brady before Tom Brady was born (although, in his 40s Blanda looked twice as old as Brady does now). On the other hand, Blanda also kicked field goals and extra points. This is something Brady never did. And is unlikely ever to do.
But while Blanda may have had something to do with my father's change of heart, my best guess it was the move to Boondockia that sealed the deal. I think my father may have felt he was finally getting his own back on Halas a little bit by bringing in the Rockford signal of the Bears' home games into our den. And we got that signal with me, holding the antenna on the TV set in some awkward pose, or holding the antenna detached from the set in an even more contorted pose. The picture, what I could see of it, was at best a bit snowy, even on sunny days. It was a good thing the Bears wore navy blue uniform shirts during home games.
So maybe my youthful TV operation is not entirely comprable -- I don't have to get out of my recliner now, for one thing -- but the point is, I am used to operating the TV on command.
But these are not the limits of my duties as an older, male Alexa.
We will be watching a movie and Long Suffering Spouse will remark, "That actress was in something else we like. Look her up." Mind you, my wife's phone is next to her at all times and, if she is not on her computer, she is probably on her iPad. But I must be the one to look it up. And report.
Or she will be doing schoolwork. She'll look up and say, "Hey, have we heard from Middle Son this week? Text him and find out how he is doing." I always include her on the group chat lest she think I have failed to carry out her command and, also, so she will have the response she is looking for immediately, without the middleman.
When she is through correcting, Long Suffering Spouse has to assign grades. "So, there's 26 points on this quiz," she'll tell me. "What's 18 out of 26?" I promise you that she has calculators on her phone, her iPad, and her computer, but I have to perform the calculation. "69%," I will report (in case you were wondering).
I have many advantages over Alexa or Siri. Nothing I hear is getting beyond the room we're sitting in, at least not by accident. Who knows who might be listening at Apple or Google? And Long Suffering Spouse does not have to worry about getting weird ads on her phone just because she asks a question. That's now my problem.
"Curmudgeon," Long Suffering Spouse said to me recently, tossing me the label from a skein of yarn (she'd been making scarves for the grandchildren). "Order me three more of these. Same color."
I obliged, of course. And had the softest, fluffiest popup ads ever, for about a month....
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