Adventures in the First World

So I’m lying awake at 3:30 a.m. thinking about issues with the new tabbing software, among other things, when I hear a woman’s voice coming from somewhere in the house. Given that the only woman in the house that I’m aware of is accounted for to my immediate right, this is mildly disturbing. I hear nothing else. Must be my imagination. After it all, it is 3:30 in the morning and my mind has been spinning thinking about judge preferences. Of course I’m hearing voices.

Some time passes. I hear it again. Definitely a woman’s voice, somewhere in the house. The cat jumps up and heads out to investigate. Then another woman’s voice, on my immediate right, says that my computer must be talking or something, and tells me to go do something about it.

Now let’s face it. Computers don’t start talking all of a sudden. Nor do iPads or iPhones (at least not those without Siri). But I dutifully walk around the house, checking all the various pieces of hardware. No culprit is found.

This is starting to get scary. This is why I don’t have a gun in the house, because by now I’d be loading a cartridge into the chamber and getting ready to put some lead into our home invader. At which point, I’m now in the kitchen, and my Jawbone speaker on the shelf says to me very loudly, “Please recharge your battery.”

If I had been armed, I would have shot it.

I connected it to the charger and went back to bed. The cat was huddled under the dining room table, still trying to figure who else was in the house. I went back to lying awake thinking about judge preferences.

Moral of the story: First, don’t shoot, it’s only me. Second, we are now at the dawn of the age when our appliances feel no compunctions about waking us up in the middle of the night to tell us to feed them. I prefer the good old days, when our appliances were more humane, and waited until waking hours to tell us to feed them.