My friend Randy the trucker admitted to me one day that he was falling in love with Siri. He'd been driving too long, I told him, too long alone in the cab with that voice. I myself couldn't stand her, and stopped using her. What especially bothered me was the way she'd say things more forcefully if I missed the turn she wanted me to take. Usually this happened because I wanted it to happen, for example, I was driving around the block of my destination. But she'd say Turn right at the next street with a kind of attitude, and I'd think, I don't need that kind of attitude, I'll use another way to find my destination.
But my wife is a lot like Randy, she relies on Siri entirely, because she doesn't really have a clear idea of where things are in space. So when her Siri, which is a man with an Australian accent, told her to go off on this country road the other day, she really wanted to do it. I could see that the country road was going to be a little out of the way, and probably slower than the divided highway we were on, so I told her I was opposed. But she was driving, so I said ok, might as well see where this road takes us. There was no way that road could be quicker.
Of course it's easy to get mad at a male Australian Siri who doesn't have a clue about a country road. But I thought about why it could have happened. Did he think there was some kind of construction on the main road? (there was, but it merely slowed traffic, not stopped it, and the main road I thought was still faster)...was he being fed wrong information somewhere?
Randy's Siri apparently sent him on this one road south of town where there was a bridge with eleven-foot clearance, and he and his truck needed thirteen-foot clearance. Fortunately he saw it coming and stopped his truck in time so it didn't have the top two feet of its load clipped off. But the problem was, there was no place to turn around. It had rained a lot in the last week, so it was very soggy right off the shoulder - there was no room for error. He had to back up - straight, in his own lane, with his blinkers on - and he had to keep it straight for quite a ways until he found a place where he could pull over. It was quite a ways, and he wasn't sure he would make it. He turned Siri off; he couldn't believe she would get him into this kind of a jam.
Next time I saw him, he had cooled off on Siri quite a bit. He never really was in love with her, he said, he'd just been kidding. Well, one one level, I knew he'd been kidding - he knew she was just a computer connected to some source creating and giving directions - if it got things wrong, there could be all kinds of reasons. Maybe she just didn't know about the low bridge or they failed to program into her a simple warning, be careful if you're driving a truck. I'm sure he has to learn that she's not infallable, that someone somewhere is sending him down the wrong road.
With my wife's Siri, the Australian guy, I found myself glad that I'd proved him wrong, that his way was longer than mine. Somehow the mere fact that he had an accent had led me to not quite believe him in the first place, as if it was obvious that you shouldn't let some stranger send you down the wrong road. But my wife had come to trust him implicitly, so she still hasn't figured out where he might have gone wrong. I still do it the hard way - stare hard at the map before I even set off, write down the directions if necessary, keep them right by me as I drive, and, if I miss a stop, pull way over so I can start the whole process again from the beginning.
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