By Tony Deyal
When my colleague Kam told me about Meta, I thought he was talking about one of the fancy women he hanged on to and spent lots of time with. As I told him, “Listen man, I know you’re into Meta types of women, but I prefer ‘ladies’ of substance and class, so you can keep your Meta because mine are much, much better.” He laughed loudly and asked, “So why you want me to help you now with Meta and not Rita or even Peter?”
I explained, “Well, I got the shock of my life. I was on WhatsApp on my phone, and you know how many people call me or send me notes and jokes and stuff, then the next thing I see is something called Meta, and it is not your girlfriend, it is something with the name Meta. Was that a joke you dropped on me, or is it one of your computer tricks that you’re always trying on me and our friends?” Next thing I knew, he started to tell me about “Artificial intelligence” and how much it makes a difference. He said it as a technology that helps us to design things like cars that drive themselves.”
That was it for me. What I was upset about was that when I opened my WhatsApp, I am increasingly finding something that is some kind of boss called Meta Al, or messages grated by Al from Meta with what was called “Mute notifications” and worse, “Default” or what seems to be “Alert” up to ten options. I’ve had columns, computers, and all kinds of phones, but mainly “DIGICEL.” For more than 50-years, I had them. Now, to see that I was not just Chat, but I had more than Meta and worse, catching my Al and watching them day after day, was too much for me.
I can’t speak about my friends because some of them were the ones who sent me whatever they asked for from Meta Al to drop on me, not with their words, or even a “Hey Tony”; What they did was not all but Al, and it was who, or what, said whatever was supposedly sent by my colleagues to me. If I was responsible for either the computer, or WhatsApp, that would have been the end of them or, in other words, Al of them would have been gone for good. Or so I thought. In the famous line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” we hear, “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” For my friends in Trinidad, and in the Caribbean, there were man days, weeks, and even months over years when there was “not a drop to drink.” In my computer or phone, Al gone with the wink.
This is the kind of lime, and life, I lived for so many years that I knew exactly what caught me in this mess. Having lived with my father and mother in places where men had outside wives, and wives also had other men but kept it quiet, I was always interested in the humour and what we all knew as the “Men vs Women”, especially who was winning and who was losing. While we knew, or so we thought, that the women were ahead of the men, we still liked to know “who did what to whom with what.” I reached out to my friend Kam to tell him what I was up to, and he agreed that it was an extremely great idea. I told him about what had happened to WhatsApp, and he said: “Well boy, the time is changing you know. You have to join the group.” I slammed the phone and went back to this column. Within a few minutes, I got a note on my WhatsApp from Kam.
Thinking that he was apologising, I opened it and this is what I got! My friend Kam had sent me a “light-hearted” article by Meta Al using the “spirit” of my columns of over 50 years of sharp humour and Caribbean wit on the timeless subject of men versus women. It started with, “Men vs Women: A Battle Nobody Wins.” Obviously, I had lost.
This was the Meta Al article supposedly me: Long before Adam looked at Eve and said, “Darling, I am hungry?” and Eve replied, “So what you have in the fridge?”, men and women were always at war. Not the kind with guns and bombs, but the ones with silent treatment, sarcastic remarks, and the occasional flying frying pans. Take, for example, shopping. A man enters a store like a heat-seeking missile. He knows what he wants, he locks in, and he’s out before the credit card machine can say “declined.”
A woman, however, treats shopping like an Olympic sport. She can spend three hours in the store, not buy a single thing, and still come out smiling like she won gold in window-shopping. Men call it torture, women call it “browsing.” Then there’s the GPS problem. If a man gets lost, he will drive around in circles until the car runs out of gas, the marriage runs out of patience, and the children grow up and leave home. Ask for directions? Never. Women, on the other hand, will stop at every stranger on the road, even the ones who look like they’re wanted by police, just to ask the way. And somehow, they get there before the man.”
Meta Al continued: Communication is another battleground. A man will say, “I’m fine” and mean exactly that. A woman will say, “I’m fine” and mean anything from “You better apologize in the next ten seconds” to “Start digging your own grave.” The poor man, thinking he’s safe, will go back to watching TV and then wonder why the woman is suddenly plotting like a Bollywood villain. But the real difference is memory. Women never forget. A man may forget his anniversary, his children’s birthdays, even his own middle name. A woman remembers what he said at 7:42 p.m. on the 12th of May 2003, while wearing the blue shirt with the missing button.
In fact, women have better storage than iCloud and no “delete” button. At the end of the day, though, it’s not really a war. It’s more like a comedy show with two headliners who refuse to leave the stage. Men think women are impossible. Women think men are hopeless. And somehow, both are right. As one married man told me, “I don’t try to win arguments with my wife anymore. I just nod, smile, and pray she doesn’t check my browser history. And that is why most men, as well as women, will never truly be equal. Because if they were, then who would be wrong all the time?”
Then, to make it worse, Kam said he was not too happy about the Met Al ending and asked me what I thought. Before I could tell him exactly what I felt about this, that and his mother, he decided to change the punchline style with one big witty kicker at the end. Before I could respond to how I planned to kick his gut and butt, he sent me a different ending he thought was the Met Al best, “As Tony Deyal would say, ‘In every marriage, the man may be the head of the house- but the woman is the neck…and the neck does all the turning.’”
*Tony Deyal said, “You wrong! When I catch up with you, I will twist you and all your parts round, and round, and round again, and then I will send your bum in the jail and the rest of you in the hospital.”
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