11:11

my friend cameron is slowly turning into a robot.

his cellphone went off the other day while we were walking around by the cemetary on walker st. so i asked him who he was talkin to. turns out it was just an alarm going off telling him that an auto message would be sent to his girlfriend in a few minutes. he then went on to explain that his girl usually sends him a message at 12:34 telling him to make a wish. my girl does the same thing at 11:11. girls are cute.

but since cameron is an overly productive and automated person he is now writing and testing software that can take all the hassle of our simple human engagements and automate the parts that can be automated. like greetings. hi, how are you? i'm fine how have you been? how many times a day do you hear this? how many times a day do you feel like people don't actually mean what they're saying, like they're just robots? well cameron kinda wants to take this idea to the next step and start using greetings, especially text based ones, that essentially condense all the information of a greeting down into a few words and even fewer assorted letters on a screen. have i mentioned that in addition to being nerd he's a linguist?

so having been sufficiently surprised and delighted that once again cameron had taken an active interest in the inner workings of her mind, his girlfriend sends him her wish for the day along with some other snippets of daily life that drive the program to suggest several other canned responses and sometimes even automatically reply for him. whenever he comes up for something that would make a good 12:34 wish he puts it into his phone and the program automatically sends appropriate responses to his girl and lets him know when a real response is required.

he also has a calendar program that reads all his voicemails and schedules appointments based on the messages people leave him. it's actually kinda impressive, the thing has a database on every person he knows and appends to his calendar things to bring up at coffee, new happenings in his friends daily lives, things to remember not to bring up, and who's dating who. i almost want to believe he's working with tom and cruising myspace with this thing.

why he does this is beyond me, like i said he's a nerd and nerds are usually a bit anti social. he's just finding a way to have his technology take care of his interpersonal interactions so that he can focus his time and energy on other things. it's kinda impressive in a sick sort of future shock sort of way.

however, the entire time he was explaining the thing to me i was trying to search back through all our recent conversations in the back of my head. i'm almost sure that i've gotten messages from this system of his, maybe even had conversations with it. maybe i haven't actually talked to him on the phone in months.

i don't think we're going to be friends for much longer.




p.s. i really don't think this is even possible yet. but i like knowing people's schedules