The Square Peg – Stupid Watch!

The Square Peg – Stupid Watch!

© S. Bradley Stoner

I’m excited… or at least I was. My lovely won an Apple Smartwatch, Series 1. It’s an older model, but brand new in the box, and never opened before I got my paws on it. See, she gave it to me for my birthday… a little early, but what the heck. She’s a sweetie. I read about all of the things it can do… track your exercise, heartbeat, play your tunes, get messages, and take calls… oh wait, you can’t do that last one with this series, but you do get Siri and her dulcet tones. Besides, you have to carry your phone with you… and it has to be an iPhone. Well, hell and damnation! I have an android.

So, being the clever soul that I am, I look up hacks for Smartwatch on android, figuring that some smart geek out there has figured out how to make that work. Turns out, there are a couple of hacks, but it also turns out they don’t work very well, if at all, on the Series 1. Well, crap on a cracker! My Smartwatch isn’t looking very damn smart at this point.

So, I call up my oldest… a devoted iPhone aficionado… to see if he knows of any good way to make my Smartwatch work on my brand-new Moto. Nope. Not a chance. No way. No how. At this point, I’m about ready to stuff that Smartwatch down my stupid muzzle loader and send it to Apple hell where it belongs. I think oldest catches my drift, and pipes up, “I have an iPhone 5 you can have… I just keep it around for backup, but I’m on iPhone 8 now and I still have my iPhone 6.”

I should be thrilled, right? Only I’m ready to throttle the kid for collecting iPhones like they were candy. Those suckers are expensive… some would say overpriced… me being among the ‘some.’ None-the-less, if I can get an iPhone at no cost, well I suppose it will be worth it if it makes my Smartwatch work. I’m not thrilled about it. I like my android and I know how to use it. iPhones come with enough instructions that you ought to be able to build one when you get done reading them. Oh, and I’ll have to switch providers as well. That was in the cards anyway.

Despite what the former “Can you hear me now,” guy says, Sprint sucks when it comes to coverage. There are a plethora of Sprint phone dead zones in the western U.S., and I happen to like to travel there… a lot, not to mention my youngest is an OTR semitruck driver who travels out there a lot as well. He’s the one who decided Mom and Dad need cell phones… this after I had finally gotten rid of mine after years of having one for work because I kept getting work related calls after I retired. For a brief two years, silence was golden.

Anyway, when he comes home later this month, he’ll switch over to a new network, meaning so will we. That’s when I’ll get the iPhone. Until then my stupid Smartwatch will sit on the counter and collect dust.