What NOT To Do!

I know I said I was back, and I know I’ve still been AWOL.

I can hardly believe I declared I was emerging from my blogging hiatus almost four weeks ago and since then I’ve barely posted anything. I have drafted no fewer than six posts that have now (as of this morning) all fallen onto the cutting room floor. (Oh well.)

Sadly, life has been throwing all sorts of curve balls my way and getting my head around posting something – anything – has required more energy than I’ve had available. Sadly also, I’ve not had time to catch up with any posts from my friends out there in the blogging community either. But I do value those connections and I promise to do better.

Between work commitments, implementing changes to our business model (this has taken a lot of my attention), a leaking roof and keeping on top of all the accompanying mould (something that has almost broken my heart), we have also been swamped (pardon the pun) by flow-on effects (there’s another pun) of all the increased rain we’ve been experiencing.

Thankfully, although it’s raining again at the moment, this is the first bit of rain we’ve had for a week. Our yard has started to dry out if only – or merely – just enough for Dean to run the mower over the grass without the mower’s wheels leaving gouges throughout the lawn.

Yes, my life has had its challenges lately and added to all of the above, I’m still battling the lasting effects of being unwell and trying to get on top of that. I am getting there.

Anyway, now to get to the reason this post will be published and shared and not become another draft that gets deleted.

Sometime last week, I learnt what not to do, although the result of me doing something I shouldn’t have (thankfully) resulted in making someone’s day.

My error (ok, technically it was a technological error) resulted in a text message being transmitted to a client – something I was trying to do – but it also resulted in the message saying something it shouldn’t have said and teaching me that important lesson in What NOT To Do!

–⋅ o ♥ o ⋅–

So . . . what was I doing, and what did the message say?

Firstly, a little background.

Although I’m the owner of (several items of) Apple technology, I have never been a huge fan of voice commands or the virtual assistant. I don’t have anything personal against Siri, I’m sure she can, and does, perform a wonderful service. I’ve just never been an advocate of jumping on board because, in my experience, there has always been a gap between the request and the result. An Apple HomePod Mini I own, for example, won’t play the radio station I want to listen to. Every time I ask, Siri tells me “I’m sorry, I can’t find that station in Apple Music”. I don’t subscribe to Apple Music, I don’t want to. I just want to listen to my favourite radio station via I💗Radio or TuneIn, but Siri insists on only permitting me to listen to stations I subscribe to.

Siri plays the desired station for Dean, but not for me – the owner of the device – go figure! But Dean’s not always home when I want to listen to the radio. This is why, after months of frustration, I deactivated Siri and because we are unable to get FM radio reception inside our home, I decided to purchase a Google Nest Hub. Thankfully “Hey Google” does play my radio station.

However . . OMG, there’s always a however . . . in setting up this device, I had to enable voice commands on my iPhone. I was ok with that, and I am still ok with that, and in the meantime, I also became the owner of an Apple Watch.

Fast forward to now, and I am happy to use Siri. She’s activated on my iPhone and Apple Watch, and my iMac, and I’ve been through a huge learning curve learning what to say and how to say it and, now, I’ve also learnt what not to do when giving voice commands.

What is it that’s what not to do?

DO NOT use the voice command to reply to a text message AND conduct another conversation at the same time.

Why?

Because these two responses will merge into one and the resulting message may not say what you intended it to. Here’s what happened to me.

I always send our client’s a friendly reminder message the day before we are scheduled to visit their home.

(Part of my) Message to a Client: Just a friendly reminder that Dean and I will be at your place tomorrow morning around 8:00 am.

I was cooking dinner when the client responded to my message.

Message from client: All fine thank you Clare 🙂

Because my hands were full, I used a voice command to reply because I believe it’s a courtesy to let our clients know I received their message.

The reply message I asked Siri to send was: Thank you.

It was at this precise moment that Dean asked me what episode we were up to in a show we’d been streaming.

My response to my husband: Six

Now, I thought Siri had already sent the message but this was not the case. Siri was still listening, although, not very closely and she combined Thank you and Six into one message and promptly sent those words to our client.

I spied the message content at the same time my watch made the outgoing text message sound. I don’t know how to spell the sound, so here it is to listen to.

Because I saw the content of the message was more than simply Thank you a fraction of a moment prior to hearing the outgoing text message sound, I thought “Oh My GOD!”

I quickly dropped everything to race across the room to retrieve my phone and confirm what I saw. I felt sick. The message was worse than what I thought it was and read: Thank you sex

I quickly called the client to apologise and explain what had been going on as I was trying to cook our evening meal, respond to her message using a voice command and speak to Dean all at the same time (usually I can successfully multitask) but all we could do was laugh, and laugh we did.

Luckily we have a close relationship with that client and together we continued to laugh – loud, and long and hard – as I repeatedly tried to explain I had said SIX to my husband not SEX but doing so through our laughter was impossible.

Soon we were wiping away tears and begging for mercy.

When our call was over, I had to respond to let her know that those minutes of uncontrollable laughter had been the best giggle ever. Her response surprised me.

I had no idea it was her birthday, but I do know now and I also know she appreciated the unexpected gift I gave her.

(In future, I’ll be more careful telling Siri what to do.)