… when cell phones were bricks and TVs were boulders, and I was not even a toddler, barely clothed… even then I was thinking about how someday we might be able to talk to our nonexistent robot buds and… somebody or something in the air would listen. This was way back before Al Gore invented the Internet, around that time when people here said they liked mauve, but could never figure out if they wanted to pronounce “mauve” like a bleating sheep, or as the British do… and way before I could even be dreaming of talking to my very own Quantum Leap companion jumpin’ across the freakin’ planetary divides and the molecular nanospaces to be with me. Baby! Me and my very own Al,
Al (not Al Gore) who was also gonna be my bodyguard, my sidekick, my coach, my digital assistant. Yeah. And we were gonna command the universe without even knowing it… without even moving from that cushy pit of a couch in the TV room with the plants and our very own living version of a Cheshire Cat looming, hiding somewhere, and that little rat-terrier of a dog whose only job was to keep the couch free of popcorn and other sundry droppings. It seems I was super-precocious to anticipate what I couldn’t even know – not yet! not without doing the time-warp again — I would later discover that I just don’t like sitting at a desk or at the computer. I truly needed a digital assistant. So I could do thinks from the couch.
Just like you.
Me, as my nom-de-plume Vladimir… back in my truckin’ days…
I was gonna light it up. But I also had just a pragmatic problem that I wanted to solve. I was in business, and I had these cost-plus and what people also called these time-and-material type customers, right? An interest driven by money, or the lack of it. I was in the construction business. and every week or every month I’d have to generate bills for them the cost-plus people. For me. But if my books weren’t completely up-to-date (they never were) creating these billing statements… this had to be done… consumed my Saturday mornings with ugh! compilation of time and expense at desk on butt, and you know I didn’t like that, even tho it was a real walnut art-deco wood desk rescued from 1933 that I’d refinished myself and by hand, to boot. My friends were skateboarding golfing skiing hiking climbing going to wax museums, art shows and ball games. Whatever going to the mall had become… they were doing that. And I was stuck with a shoebox full of receipts. Where was the button to push to just do this?
So, I figured out the button part. But there was still this problem, an interesting one for a person who didn’t like sitting at a computer, which is where the problem began. I had to figure a way to create bookkeeping entries without sitting at a computer.
Talk-to-text was new. It was bad. Remember? We wrote jabberwocky poems using Naturally Speaking trained to our voice, and then we’d talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The result – hilarious. RoFL-hilarious, if truth be told. More malaprops than sense, and in endless supply. And still, I knew I was going to use that. Someday. It would get better, and it did.
In time, I built an expense-keeping app that I could talk to. Then I built a time-tracking app that I could talk to. And I taught them how to fix the horrible mistreatment of word that occurred. The malaprops. Without back-talk. Without inane chatter. It took awhile. But I eventually got to where I wanted to be. And even today, though I love these guys, and I do use them… they are just not quite there. And mileage was an afterthought.
Alas, the desk is gone. I loved that desk even tho a desk it was. But the mileage-tracker… The mileage thing is primetime now. Right now.
***
When I was John Cage I went into the isolation chamber and when I came out I was rich. By God! I was rich.
