Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference
Treat all those micro-phonies like so many spies in the wire
My neighbour is talking to a rock. He is trying to persuade it to sing.
Urging him back to the barbecue, I make a mental note to abstain from the cheap luminous pink sparkling rosé that he'd been drinking. It’s easy to recognize the bottles – I’m the one who brought them to the party.
He asks me to hang on a mo, turns back to his rockery – is it new? I never noticed it before – and addresses his favourite rock by name.
“Alexa…”
Ah, I can see what’s happening here. A closer look reveals that it’s one of those Lithe Audio Bluetooth speakers disguised as a rock to make them unobtrusive in your garden.
My inbox swells with ads for such things every May in advance of Father’s Day. Usually it’s there among the ads for GPS-tracked golf balls, monogrammed USB key fobs (“up to an incredible 4GB!”), and oversized mugs emblazoned with a badly fonted message that appears to read “World's Greatest Hocker”.
But of course this garden speaker just a speaker, not a smart speaker. It isn't listening. I guide my neighbour back indoors to find his Echo in the kitchen. I suggest he asks Alexa to make his garden rock speaker play… heh heh… some rock music. My neighbour looks me in the eye and says this is the funniest thing he has ever heard and that the joke had never occurred to him before. He doesn't seem to be laughing or even smiling as he says this.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Autosave is for wimps to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.