As if my interactions with humans weren’t stressing me out enough, technology seems to be angry at me for not spending as much time with it as I have in the last year. It started with my car. I’ve become dependent on my phone syncing with my car interface, or whatever you call it, and being able to flip to my favorite playlist, audiobook or podcast with voice commands. It also came in handy on family road trips, as the kids were able to link an iPad to it and watch a movie with surround sound.

So, of course, a few weeks before we’re set to embark on a lengthy road trip for our summer vacation, the car and the phone decided to stop talking to each other. Instead of my picking up with the latest chapter of my current book, it went to the local radio station and there it stayed. No more phone calls, no more audiobooks, and worst of all, I couldn’t continue to brainwash my kids that the ’80s were clearly the best decade of music.

My car still has a CD player, but I have long since retired my CD collection in favor of Apple Music. Sure, I still got Sirius to play, but somehow, she manages to regularly play the six songs from the ’80s that I don’t think are great. So, I turned to the other great bastion of technology, Google, to see if anyone else on the internet had run into the same problem I had. As seems to be the case lately, it was either a super simple fix, or a ridiculously complicated one. And, as I’ve also come to expect, the easy fixes didn’t work.

I was left with returning to the dealer and hoping for a miracle, which would also come with a hefty price tag. Is the convenience really worth it? As our 12-hour days on the road come closer, I am starting to rethink my initial assessment that it isn’t.

My next battle is with Alexa. Somehow, she’s managed to learn everyone else’s voice, music taste and suggest recipes for them. Last week, I asked her to go to a recipe I’ve made 100 times before. She took me to a headline news story about global warming. I tried again. I ended with a podcast about heavy metal music. By now, I was screaming at her. (My hands were already busy chopping up the raw chicken I needed cubed to start the recipe, so I couldn’t just type it in.) So, she gave up and just started playing some strange techno music I’d never heard before.

One of the kids who heard me screaming quickly Googled it and printed it out for me before I had a complete meltdown. They then thoughtfully suggested that I put the printout in my recipe box for next time.

And that brings me to the final bane of my existence: spell check. I’m probably overthinking things, but it seems to me that every time I get some kind of update for my phone, it takes it a while to learn how to spell again. My biggest battle is between the word keet and meet. It is a bad idea to raise poultry and be a swim coach at the same time.

In case you didn’t know, a keet is a baby guinea fowl, which G has been raising and hatching for two years now. And, obviously, swimming competitions are called meets. It took awhile but I finally got Siri to accept keet as a real word. And now, she insists on turning any word ending in -eet into keet. So, the WH is likely to get measurements for home improvement projects in “keet.” If I’m running late to “keet” you, I will usually try to send you a text and let you know. I also haven’t gotten a change to plant my red “keets” in the garden yet.

Another headache arises from G’s real nickname, which is also a commonly used word, in addition to being what we call him. Siri can’t figure out when to capitalize it, so now she does it any time I write out the word, and it has caused some unintentional emphasis where none was supposed to be. I’ve also sent group text messages to my kids, listing each of their tasks, and G frequently claims that he didn’t see his list because I didn’t write his name out specifically. I did, it just opted not to capitalize his name, and let it slip under the radar.

Siri also seems quite selective sometimes. For example, 9 out of 10 times, if I accidentally hit the “I” instead of the o when typing the word “shot,” she will correct it. That 10th time, the one time she doesn’t autocorrect it will be that time that I’m texting someone important like my boss, or a new swim team parent. And, of course, there is texting’s infamous relationship with the word “duck.” When all my text messages end up being about ducks and keets, I am just happy to let people assume I am obsessed with poultry, instead of figuring out what I’m really trying to say.

The WH frequently reminds me that my reliance on technology is going to turn me into the captain from “WALL-E.” He also likes to bring up the fact that our first cars were lucky to have an AM/FM radio with a manual tuner in them, and the height of luxury was a cassette player. The last time my car went to the garage, I ended up spending more to have bells and whistles tuned up and fixed than I did on the four wheels and the engine, and that bill will grow if I decide to pursue getting the Bluetooth working again.

This last year was made so much more bearable by technology. In so many ways it allowed parts of our life to continue relatively uninterrupted. Even 10 years ago, I could not have conceived my would kids manage to attend an entire year of school, and I would be able to stay gainfully employed for over a year, without leaving our house.

At the same time, I am still standing in my kitchen arguing with a tiny computer that doesn’t understand the word “scampi.” That gives me some hope that even though I’ve started letting technology run my life, we are a ways off from the artificial intelligence taking over the world.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.