Evil Robots

“The outside temperature is 35 degrees” our house’s loud electronic voice announced to me this morning as I shuffled into the kitchen. I groaned.

“H.A.L.”,our home automation system is my boyfriend’s favorite hobby, but personally, I have never cared for the idea of having my house talk to me and track my movement around our home. I’ve seen enough movies to know that this is the sort of thing that always lead to robots enslaving mankind… The great computer robot take over is probably still a few years away though… for now I just find it especially annoying that H.A.L.’s bad news about the current temperature or rain is the first thing I hear in the morning… I admit it is helpful information when it comes to determining if I am going to wear my red hoody or my yellow rain jacket, but still I like to at least have some breakfast in my tummy before I have to think about how miserable my bike ride to work will be. (It felt like I had been smacked in the face with a frozen aluminum baseball bat when I walked outside this morning by the way... 35 is like frozen hell!!!)

I think HAL has been conspiring against me with my cell phone lately too ...because my cell decided about a week ago that it would be really funny at exactly 3:33 AM every morning to chirp like it does when I received a new text message, yet when I look at my phone there are no new text messages… I have to keep checking my phone every morning though just in case it’s not crying wolf… The only reason that someone would text you at 3:33 AM is if they were dying… and I don’t want to be the woman you see on the news saying how she wished she would have just checked her phone because if she had she would have been able to save so and so from their terrible fate… no one was dying this morning though… no one had used their last bit of strength to reach out to me with a panicked SOS and tell me that their computer had gone mad and was violently choking the life out of them…. Nope… its just my damn crazy phone making a noise that is so startiling that it takes me at least half an hour to get my heart rate down enough to fall asleep again… unfortunately though, my actual alarm goes off at 5:00 AM… so I am just barely getting into my REM cycle when I’m startled awake again… when it’s the real alarm going off I have no trouble accidentally falling back asleep right away though.

The first couple times I only slept for about 10 minutes after my alarm went off, so that wasn’t a big deal, but today I slept for half an hour, which meant I had to skip my shower… I guess there are worse things in the world than not showering for a day especially since I don’t particularly enjoy showering anyway…. I mean at least no one was choked to death by evil computer robots in the middle of the night while trying to text me to come save them…

Technology really seems to be ruining my mornings though… I usually love mornings. I love the silence and the crispness and the possibilities that the day holds… but now stupid HAL and stupid Cell phone are just being noisy brats and robbing me of my sweet solicitude... evil robots!