You win, Siri. Now shut the hell up.

Siri sucks. I know that’s cruel. What I should say is that the Siri on my particular iPhone has all the verbal comprehension of a stump. She is either hearing-impaired or willfully stupid. I’ll also entertain the possibility that Apple is just jerking us around. At this point I guess it doesn’t matter. Our relationship is at an end.

You’ve seen the ad where the cute kids decide to take a cross-country road trip and basically just leave the whole thing up to Siri. She’s plotting their route and finding rodeos and barbecue joints and constellations. Must be nice. I’m surprised they didn’t just prop the phone on the steering wheel while they made out in the back. Meanwhile, I literally can’t get this bitch to give me the time of day.

I did have her send an e-mail once. It only took three tries, and lot of strange looks from the folks I passed going down the street. In the time elapsed, I could have written and edited the Gettysburg Address on the virtual keyboard. It’s like that with just about anything Siri is supposed to be able to do. Hard to believe, but you can get a map, or look up the weather or find a restaurant or anything else without having to repeatedly review the basic concepts with Siri. You can do it faster, and you can do it without needlessly annoying everybody within earshot. Sometimes the old ways are best.

Still, people seem love the idea of barking commands at an imaginary minion. And I’m convinced most of them love to be heard doing so. They don’t find it strange to talk to an algorithm in a whimsical way. Sometimes, they imagine what Siri would look like. You know, if only she could be freed from the beautiful prison that is the iPhone 4s.