July’s Dead Rubber Post

Here is one more pic of Wonderbutt, FaceTiming with me while I was in Cambridge.

J’aime ma soeur, Krach.

My sister, Crash, just got an iPhone.  The one I coveted, then decided wasn’t good enough, then coveted again when Cap’n Firepants declared he was contemplating an upgrade of his own.  iPhone upgrade, I mean.  Though he probably secretly thinks about trading me in for a better model, too.

Crash has never had an iPhone, and she is approaching this brave new world with all of the zeal of a drunken gorilla.  This is her trying to use FaceTime, iPhone’s video conferencing feature.

The big pic is Crash. People like to say she got the beauty and I got the brains. Actually, I think she's the one who says that.

So far, we haven’t FaceTimed each other yet.  Partly because I’m scared of her picture.  And partly because I enjoy trying to interpret her texts so much.

It’s not like she’s never texted before.  She has owned a cell phone.  But it apparently did not have autocorrect.  Either that or she has recently started smoking weed because I suddenly can’t understand twenty-five fifty-three percent of what she’s saying.

It reminds me of when she would call my dorm room in college and my roommate would pick up.  Roommate would say, “Hello!” then listen for a few moments and hand it to me.

“I think it’s your sister,” Roommate would say, hesitantly.  The implication being that she wasn’t absolutely sure it was not the crank caller who graced us weekly with pornographic rants, but was willing to hazard this guess because of the higher pitch of the voice and the lack of heavy breathing.

We had moved to Louisiana when my sister was about ten, and she had thrown herself into the culture wholeheartedly, somehow adopting an accent that was a combination of Cajun, Hillbilly, Southern Belle, and the Bronx.

Crash’s iPhone autocorrect appears to embrace different cultures with the same zeal as my sister.  Usually autocorrections bear some kind of similarity to the new words it suggests, and the replacements tend to be in the same language, but Crash’s autocorrections sometimes appear in another language altogether – bearing no resemblance to the original word at all.  Here are a couple of her recent ones regarding Wonderbutt’s new Zazzle store.

How in the world did she get autocorrect to put an inverted question mark?

Note the fancy caret symbol over the "a" in "hate." And "d'armure." Did her iPhone suddenly start speaking French?

It doesn’t help that even her communications that come through the way she intended sometimes have me scratching my head.  So, I’m continually asking myself if I should know what  she is talking about – or point out that she’s had another autocorrect malfunction.  This somewhat defeats the whole purpose of texting – a brief correspondence that cuts through all of the pomp and circumstance of an actual telephone conversation.  I spend more time deciphering Crash’s messages than I do on composing my blogs – which, believe it or not, is a lot of time.

Crash used to call me right after she sent an e-mail, and proceed to tell me everything that was in the e-mail.  I’m thinking she may have to do some texting follow-up calls as well.  I don’t want her to stop texting, though.  She is my human Wonderbutt.

If you’d like to read more about my feelings on autocorrect, click here😉