Bluetooth challenged!

My new car came with hands free/voice activated Bluetooth for my cell phone. It has taken me a while to get it set up because it is so awfully hot outside or in the garage that I didn't want to sit in the car for any length of time and go through all the steps that were involved.

First, I had to try to get the car to recognize the phone and the phone to recognize the car. Then, I tried to get the car's system to download the contacts in my phone. That didn't work for several tries. I finally got everything set up and the system in the car downloaded all my contacts from my phone so you can just tell it to call whoever you want by name. I thought I would try it today and see if I could call my daughter's cell phone. So, I got in the car, got the phone connected, got confirmation that the contacts transfer was complete and was backing out of the driveway.

So I said, "call Jennifer cell" and at first it just answered back to me "pardon?", so I repeated it. It repeated "call Jennifer cell" but it was talking in a slurred voice and I wasn't quite sure it was really going to call Jennifer or find a "tall juniper slug". Then it dialed something but not the right thing, so I tried it again, only this time I decided to do it by just telling it the number.

I got as far as the area code and the first 3 digits and it interrupted me with something like "continue, back, correct, add numbers or delete". So, I said "add numbers", which I thought meant that it wanted the rest of the numbers. This kept going on for several tries until it wanted to dial "5552369728392561". Then, I had to go over it again and try to "delete" that number and try again. Well, I started laughing and couldn't respond to it's "pardon" "add numbers" "delete" or anything else. It just kept saying "listening" and "pardon" and I was laughing so hard I not only couldn't speak, I couldn't catch my breath and barely drive at the same time. I finally just turned it off and tried it again.

Finally I got it to work but my daughter was in a meeting and didn't answer her phone after all of that. Then, to top it off, I got to the store that I was going to, turned the car off and was getting out of the car, and my stupid cell phone started ringing. I answered it and it was my daughter calling back. Not only did I not get a chance to make a call from my car's system, but now I didn't even get a chance to answer one either.

You know what they say, "That only happens to 3% of the population" (see blog entry of June 30, 2010 to get the full impact of this saying!