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This is how absurd you look taking a call on your Apple Watch

Technically Incorrect: An encounter with a friend is interrupted by his Apple Watch going off. Oh, the silliness.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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He listened, then he twisted his head toward his wrist to talk. Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

On Thursday evening, I was having dinner in a San Francisco restaurant when I espied someone I knew across the room.

Being groomed in the school of politeness, I wandered over to offer a greeting of goodwill.

As I was three feet away, he seemed to experience an involuntary twitch, as if something had bitten him beneath the table.

When he lifted his wrist to his ear, I quickly realized that his Apple Watch had gone off.

Even writing those last four words makes me wonder whether we're already in a Narnia for ninnies. Here was a grown man not only listening to his watch, while plugging his other other ear with an available finger, but also twisting his head to talk to his watch.

When he finished his wristy business, I greeted him with the words: "Curtis, do you realize how silly you look?"

"Yes," was his reply.

There have been comedians already mocking the idea of taking a call on the Apple Watch. But this was real life. Or as real a life as you're going to get in San Francisco.

I should explain that the person in question is Curtis Sparrer, elevated member of the public relations community. He appeared at No. 27 in the Business Insider list of Top 50 PR people.

This is an educated man. He went to what is said to be the most superior (academically speaking) high school in America. Yet here he was listening and talking to his wrist. And he was talking loud. This was not a quiet restaurant.

I considered calling emergency services. He stared at me and huffed a little.

"Look," he explained. "I had a Psion in high school. No one else did. My pocket used to buzz. I like having the latest things."

Who can say that he isn't a pioneer? Many pioneers must have looked extremely silly when they were pioneering.

"Oh, look, there's those couple of idiots in a machine they think is a bird!"

It was the onlookers who were the absurd ones, not realizing what they were witnessing.

Still, for now some may struggle with the peculiar images that arise because of a watch that you can talk to.

Until, of course, we're all doing it.