Jerry’s Ink: I Hate My iPhone

Come on, admit it, you secretly hate your iPhone, too.

I’ll bet that if they did an autopsy they would find that Steve Jobs died of shame because he released the iPhone to the world years before it worked right.

Yes, I know there are a million apps in the iPhone. You can turn your iPhone into a flashlight to read a menu in dimly lit restaurants that should print their menus in Braille.

There’s an app you can use to track your dog or your cat or a drunken 17-year-old any place in the world.

And, in a pinch, if you can find the right app, you can leave your iPhone alone in your kitchen and it will cook up a delicious meal for two.

There’s an app that will make your iPhone puff up and expand and soften until it turns into a bed for two.

Sure, I know the apps are all wonderful. But have you tried to make a phone call with the damn thing?

It has the range of a 10-foot piece of string with a Dixie Cup attached to each end.

The sound is terrible and, for those of us over 50, the iPhone is single-handedly bringing back land phone lines, and pretty soon we will have a phone booth on every street like in the good old days.

When I try to type a message on my iPhone, it looks like I’m typing while wearing boxing gloves. My cute fat fingers seem to touch three letters on the tiny, super-sensitive keyboard at the same time.

Then there is predictive text, which tries to guess what I am about to type and tries to correct my atrocious spelling before I even finish the word. Thus, when I try to type my name, “Jerry,” the predictive text insists that my name is “Kerry.” So if you ever get a message from someone named Kerry, it’s really coming from me, Jerry.

But this isn’t the worse thing about my iPhone.

If you just stare at it, your iPhone will start making phone calls.

And “butt calls” are costing me a fortune.

I have called people I haven’t seen in years with my butt. All you have to do is put your iPhone in your pocket and just the movement of your walking will set it off and it will start making phone calls known around the world as “butt calls.”

I’ve called people living in Hong Kong at 3 a.m., their time. These are people who I haven’t been in contact for 20 years.

I’ve called dead people with my iPhone. This may be my problem for keeping dead people’s phone numbers on my phone list, but I have this theory that these people, whom I love, are not really dead as long as I have their phone numbers.

Yet, when I try to intentionally make a simple phone call to someone alive and less than a mile away, my iPhone gurgles, hisses and the words “Call failed” come up 90 percent of the time.

And while I’m at it, Siri— the tiny woman who lives in the iPhone and is only there to be your slave—is a fraud.

The executives from Apple and their ad agency should be punished for that false commercial where Siri answers any question Martin Scorsese asks her and does his bidding.

Scorsese is in the back of a cab talking to Siri and she is doing everything but having sex with him. I’m sure the “Have sex with Siri” feature will be there when they release the new, improved iPhone in September.

As for me, I have never had a moment when Siri did what I asked. I have begged, I have pleaded and I have cursed her.

I may talk with marbles in my mouth but all I ever get from Siri is: “Sorry, I do not understand you.”

Siri is a woman, and I’m used to women not listening to me or understanding me when I talk.

It’s a genetic thing.

In the history of the Della Feminas, no woman has ever listened to a Della Femina male.

My grandfather could not get my grandmother to listen to a word he said. Same thing with my father. He would say, “Connie, here’s what I want to do today,” and my mom would smile and do whatever she planned to do.

In my lifetime I have had just two women indicate that they understood what I was saying by nodding their heads when I was talking. I married both of them.