'Hey, Kamikaze!'

“Hey, Kamikaze,” my text message read. “Show me a life if you get a chance.”

You’d think by now I’d be accustomed to voice-to-text screw-ups, where I say something into my smart phone and get some very stupid results.

Some days I wonder why I don’t I just type my messages in the first place, instead of speaking and freaking at what I see on the screen.

‘How’s that?’

The only thing my phone seems to properly record is the f-bomb, which I spew in great numbers upon viewing its horrendous transcriptions.

This latest one, however, was just a hunk a burning marlarkey.

I was texting my friend, Jodi, and asking her to contact me, so I said “Hey-comma—Jodi,” which my phone mutated into “Hey, Kamikaze.”

It was unadulterated gibberish, but I must say that it pretty much sums up my recent interactions with man and machine.

I am supposed to be writing this post on a new computer. My old Apple, which I’ve had since 2015, is a fossil in tech years.

The thing was getting slower and slower and giving me the beach ball of doom every time I looked at the keyboard.

And then on Wednesday night I decided I’d had enough. I called the Apple store in downtown Brooklyn and made an appointment for Saturday morning.

Out, Damned Bot!

The person I spoke with told me to bring my old computer downtown so they could migrate the data to the new device.

I had what I thought would be the final interaction with the old clunker, which seemed to work even slower in anticipation of its impending demise.

“This is our last night together, mother f—cker!” I said to the computer screen. (I'm trying to clean up my act.)

Well, not exactly.

It turns out that this particular Apple store sells computers and repairs them, but the act of transferring data is somehow beyond their capabilities—even though they told me over the phone that they could do this very thing.

They also don’t have a bathroom, which I learned upon arriving early and I was thus forced to dash over to the nearby Long Island Railroad Station to use their lavatory--while lugging around my old desktop like a drunken vacuum cleaner salesman.

However, that place was closed for “cleaning.”

In Search Of…

Just a sidenote here—I’ve been in that LIRR bathroom and nothing short of a sustained napalm attack could ever clean that rathole.

The sign said the bathrooms on the trains were open, but I knew sure as Sheboygan that if I hopped aboard a stationary train just to use the can, the doors would close right behind and I’d roaring off to Montauk at the speed of sound.

I finally spoke with a salesperson and ordered a new computer, but I had to have it delivered because I wasn’t about to haul two machines home.

And I’ll have to work over the phone with tech support to move the data.

So, to recap: I spent 40 bucks in cab fare, wasted my Saturday morning and was forced to use the bathroom at a nearby Whole Foods, all for a transaction that could’ve been down online.

I spoke with a nice young man who called to apologize for the snafu, and I advised him to tighten up his organization as there were some serious communication gaps.

I’m writing this post on the old computer and I can almost hear the bastard mocking me, “I’m still here, mother f—cker.”

Hey, kamikaze, why don’t you shut the hell up?