The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sarah and I were down at the Suds and Duds laundromat doing what our own machines wouldn’t do last week. Mine was leaking water from somewhere in its enameled casing and Sarah’s just wouldn’t turn on anymore. While we were idling over the noise of washers and dryers, we got to complaining about life in the 21st Century, a favorite pastime for us South Enders. Sarah had a bottle of wine discreetly hidden in a paper bag and I was working through a six pack of beer I’d picked up on the way to the Suds and Duds at Tyee Store. We made quite the pair.

“So I bought one of those gizmos,” she was telling me, “you know, the little canister that has a brain. Alexa.” I shook my head, no, not sure what she was referring to. “It’s a device, Skeeter, to hook up all your other gizmos. Answers questions, puts on songs you request, orders stuff online. Seriously, you never heard of this?” she asks and pours herself another glass of merlot from the paper bag. I assured her I had not. “Some people put one of those in half the rooms in their house.”

“So it’s like a TV remote?” I asked, quite the Neanderthal. And popped my third bottle. I could see my sheets spinning in the big Maytag, round and round, only another quarter hour or so, then I could go home to my broken washer and my deviceless home.

“No, it’s not like a TV remote,” she said in a voice a mom would use on an exasperatingly stupid kid. “It’s like a computer that listens and learns. It figures out your likes and dislikes. Plus it answers all the questions you can throw at it. Like a talking encyclopedia. But here’s the thing,” she whispers, lowering her head close to mine, as if we weren’t the only two people in the place. “It listens to you all the time.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean it hears what you’re saying. The other day I was talking to a neighbor over coffee and I mentioned the washer was busted. An hour later my computer started getting ads for appliances. Washers on sale.” She said it was no coincidence. It had started happening all the time. “Now,” she told me, “I’m afraid to turn it on. I unplugged it. And I’m still not sure it isn’t listening.”

“So it’s sending all this back to Headquarters?” I asked, not sure where headquarters might actually be. Sarah nodded, took a long hard pull on the wine, looked nervously around the laundromat, the poster child for Artificial Intelligence Paranoia. “They’re listening, Skeeter. They’re keeping tabs on us. Right now they just want to sell me a washer dryer combo, but I don’t know what else they’re thinking about.”

A truck pulled up to the front door. Sarah pulled away from me like she’d been hit with the voltage from a cattle prodder, like this Alexis thing had commandeered a vehicle and come to check on her. Maybe ask if she needed another bottle of merlot ordered and then delivered by drone. By the looks of her, she could use two. I figured I had time for maybe one more beer.

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