Apple Watch: My All-Too-Human Experience with Techie Joe

Went in for my “tech appointment” at the Endwright East Center in the nearby mall yesterday at 2 PM, bearing my new Apple Watch, still in its packaging. Excited.

What an experience! I was not the only old lady there who was seeking to have Joe, the tech guy figure out things about our new devices. Three of us, all of us friendly and laughing, vying for his attention — even though I was the one with the 2 PM appointment!

Since the watch has to be connected to the iphone, that was the first hurdle I had to cross. For my phone is 5 years old! Even has an on/off button, which Joe says, hasn’t been true for years!

He didn’t know if it would connect. That took some waiting on both of our parts. Then, whoopee, it would! Though, of course, I hadn’t updated the iphone for quite a while, and that took about 20 minutes. Plus the watch connection took another 20 minutes; plus I had to go to a different part of the Endwright Center to get enough bars on the internet to make it all happen. It went on from there.

I got the “fall” feature connected, as well as others. The entire experience lasted nearly two hours. I’ve only barely looked at the watch since I got home. Scares me some. It’s on my left wrist. Will have to just ease into this new tech gradually.

What’s really amazing to me was how deftly Joe worked with all three of us, one after another, as we came up to him to ask about this or that and how to install or fix. He swiftly shifted from one to the other, always seeking to figure out what this phone needs to fix this particular glitch; finding out, and then getting some app? or other for other for each of us to download, while waiting another 20 minutes, at the correct end of the store .  . .

Joe is a tiny man, somewhere I’d guess, in his 30s, probably Korean, and utterly, intensely, digitally integrated. Might be labeled, clinically, supposedly, as “hyper focused attention.” While listening to each of our problems with our watches, he would already be looking down, zeroing in, figuring out what to do.

All along, even so, I could sense that this guy is a very sensitive, kind person, not a robot, not a bot, despite his intense focus on solving each of our successive issues with our new Apple Watches.

In fact, I don’t remember conversing with Joe actually looking up at my face, and barely into my eyes, until the very end (two hours later), when I learned his name and thanked him, profusely. His sweet kind nature, though in hiding, actually peeked through briefly, with a flicker of a smile and a blush.

From my experience yesterday, it appears that as AI (or SI) expands exponentially, so does what I’d call an almost entirely new sub-species of human to keep up with it.

And hopefully, stay ahead of it.

Remain human.

Like Joe.

THANK YOU, JOE!