Sunday, December 6, 2015

Smart phone not yet advanced enough to conquer

Some people fear that machines will one day rise and outstrip human intelligence, but those people have never used a smart phone.

I shot a four minute video which then apparently went to the "cloud" for ease of accessibility. It was about as easy to snag as brunch with Kim Jong Un. I desperately needed to transfer it to my computer for editing, and luckily it said a copy was still on the phone.

I connected the phone to the computer.

Nothing.

These two future humanity-crushers could not even see each other. I tried to share it wirelessly.

"Error," the phone's screen said. "Unable to upload. Try again later." Evidently the phone, like me, has a hard time uploading under pressure.

Then a new message popped up. "Storage almost full." I thought for a moment the phone was so advanced it was capable of measuring the post-Thanksgiving pressure of my jeans.

Almost full?! The settings said I still had six gigs free. (For the non-tech-savvy, a gig is like an invisible Tupperware container in which you keep videos of total strangers' dogs playing in snow.)

Judging by my Internet search results, a lot of people have the same problem. One guy said he fixed his storage anomaly by setting his phone's clock back two years, then forward again. Rather than figure out where the clock was, I just threw a pinch of salt over my left shoulder.

I tried again later. "Unable to upload." "Storage almost full."

My eyes saw those words on the screen, but by the time they reached my brain they had been translated into "I wonder how far you can throw me through that window if you really do a full wind-up."

The video was of my son delivering food to a charity. He did this because is an upright guy, and also because his English teacher said those three little words which no teenage boy in history has ever been able to resist—"extra credit points."

My son was quickly consumed by charity towards the needy. But now the evidence of his altruism was stuck in the unreachable cloud and the deranged phone.

After about eight hours of this, the phone finally decided, for no discernible reason, to upload. One problem down. It still thinks it has absolutely no room left for new input, but I don't blame it. I know the feeling well.