I’ve decided I need to watch my mouth around my robots.
After I overheard my four-year-old yelling at our virtual assistant in the kitchen when she didn’t play exactly the right Taylor Swift song he was requesting, I heard something else in my son’s voice—me. Yes, that was definitely it—I heard ME.
How many times a week do I get annoyed with our virtual assistant when I swear I have set an alarm while cooking? Fifteen minutes later, when I asked her how long we had left on our chicken nuggets, she confidently told me, “There are no timers set.” AHH!
I also get annoyed when I ask her a specific question, like how many members there are in Train (the band), and she starts answering about trains (the choo-choo kind). That’s unacceptable, and sometimes she just needs to know that.
Once I realized I needed to be nicer to my Alexa device, I started paying attention to how I treated my other “robot assistants.”
Now, my robot vacuum and I are best buds most days. She even has a name (Dorota, Blair’s housekeeper in Gossip Girl). I have two small dogs and two young children, and I have a bad habit of snacking while walking around the house, so I try to run the Roomba in our family room at least a few days a week. Some nights, I run it two, maybe three times just for fun. And man, the robot vacuum is fun! The amount of stuff that thing can suck up, even after multiple runs, is both disgusting and awe-inspiring. Gross or not, it is extremely satisfying.
But I still find myself yelling at Dorota whenever she acts like she is falling off a cliff. Girl, I live in a one-story house! There are no cliffs to be found, just occasionally a rogue mountain of toys hiding behind the couch. Speaking of behind the couch, why does she feel the need to get back there and get stuck every single time she gets run? What are my children and dogs doing behind my couch that deserves that much attention?
My one-and-a-half-year-old is also obsessed with the robot vacuum, to the point where we have had to hide where we charge her. Somehow, he also changed the settings for her to French, and she now sounds very distinguished when she tells me she is stuck somewhere. Unfortunately, my six semesters of high school Spanish are no help here, and I find myself talking to her less and less because I am not sure she even understands my frustrations with her anymore.
I’ve also had to start figuring out how to be more polite to my car and phone GPS system. I think the problem with this is that, at a certain point, you have to realize that these devices are just a lot smarter than you. Even though taking the backroads to your destination does not seem the best idea, they know best. One of these days, you’ll just learn to just go with what they say and that there is definitely something going on around the 465 exit you were going to take, so just listen to the damn thing!
I have been trying to be more polite to my robots, and I hope my nice and calm responses to them will rub off on my kids. Being mean to your technology feels like a slippery slope to being mean to actual humans or animals if you’re not careful. After all, I am pretty sure my kids think Alexa is a real person stuck inside the device in our kitchen. And if they think that, we need to spread our kindness to her and everyone else.
So the next time you hear me say “please” and “thank you” to one of my devices, just know I am practicing respect for all things—both human and non-human.
