I thought I heard Sheila crying for help the other night, but then I thought “Nah. That’s just the washing machine.”
Before going further, I should tell you that Sheila is an Australian voice I hired a few years ago to live inside my iPhone.
Siri, the voice that came with the phone, was neither born nor raised in Pontotoc County and had serious communication issues. She was a Yankee and gave many a good laugh to people who overheard me trying to talk to her.
So, I fired her and downloaded Sheila, who also wasn’t born or raised in Pontotoc County but could understand the King’s English much better than Siri.
On the evening in question, I’d been mowing and part of it included a large patch of poison ivy that sprouted this year along the southern fence of our front yard.
I am bigly allergic to poison ivy, so, as soon as I was done, I went in the house, shucked my clothes and took a shower with lots of scrubbing, soap and hot water.
Kindra’s primary super power is being immune to poison ivy, so I asked her to wash my mowing clothes.
She was happy to do so and draped a towel over them so as to avoid touching them and accidentally getting some of the ivy oil on something I might touch later.
I had taken out my billfold, knife and keys, so all was good.
The next morning, my alarm didn’t go off at its usual 6:15. In fact, it didn’t go off at all.
I use the alarm function in my phone, which I leave on the nightstand by the bed. It was then that I thought: Oh, dang. Maybe I left the phone in my jeans pocket.
A quick check of the clothes in the washer revealed that, yes, I had indeed left it in my jeans.
And the phone was deader’n a hammer, as Grandpa Blansett used to say.
So, the next day I made an appointment at the phone store and brought home an iPhone15, which is astonishingly more advanced than the iPhone 8 that I had Titanicked.
It uses face recognition instead of passcodes, which I like. And you can tell the Siri that lives inside the phone to do this or that and she will do it, except for those times she pretends not to understand you.
Which this particular Siri did one time too many.
And that’s why the voice of an Irish chick named Colleen now lives in my phone.
And bless her shamrock-colored Irish heart, she understands everything I say.