I already had a source for useless information. I won’t name any names, but there are people that when you see them coming, you better be prepared to learn something.
Now I’ve got this girl in my bedroom. She fits inside a tweed cylinder and calls herself Alexa. Most girls who could fit in something I can’t aren’t welcome to stay in my bedroom, but we let her because she tells us the weather and lets us try to answer five Jeopardy questions every night.
That, within itself, is a debacle worthy of a thirty-minute documentary. We lay there in bed until someone says, “You wanna play jeopardy?” followed by, “Alexa, play Jeopardy,” and then this loud music starts and Johnny Gilbert shouts, “This. Is. Jeopardeeeeee’ until we’re kind of expecting Ken Jennings to come out of the bathroom in a 3-piece pajama suit with cue cards.
She goes over the rules every night. It’s like summer camp all over again. She tells us we can say “repeat” if we come to a clue we didn’t understand. That’s pretty much all of them, not because we misheard the words, but because we truly didn’t understand. It’s how I answered Bullwinkle the Moose to a clue about an intelligence operation in a foreign conflict. I guess Bullwinkle wasn’t the answer, although he seems pretty intelligent compared to the bedtime Jeopardy contestants.
I mean, do robots have friends? Does Alexa go talk to other AI girls about this one bedroom in Hazel Green, Alabama where this couple plays jeopardy every night and once answered pineapple as a Zodiac sign? Believing that Alexa has no ability to network with other cylinder girls is the only thing keeping me from dyeing my hair and jumping the border.
She gives us a jeopardy clue, and we whisper between ourselves hoping she won’t hear. “Isn’t it Tuesday Weld?” I whisper.
Well, apparently that was in the form of a question, and apparently she, being a robot and all, inherited the ears from the Bionic Woman and can hear partial thoughts uttered so quiet you couldn’t hear them yourself.
Beep, beep, beep. “I’m sorry. The correct answer is spaghetti. The next category is Etymological Anatomy.” I promise. She said that exact thing. Today.
Most of the time when she gives the clue, I whisper an answer, and then my husband quickly decides to go with whatever I didn’t say. So he shouts out a random word he learned in a fifth grade textbook glossary.
Truthfully, we know about three of the five each night, but we get credit for about one. That’s because we say, “What is Uranium?” and she says, “I’m sorry, you must phrase your response in the form of a question. Try what is or who is?”
And one of us says, “What do you think I just did?” which counts as a question.
So she says, “I’m sorry, that’s wrong. The answer is Uranium.”
“But that’s what I said. Didn’t I say that? Johnny Gilbert, are you still there? Didn’t I say that?”
In premarital counseling, they told us to never go to bed mad. Now we go to bed mad almost every night. But it’s not at each other.
Oh, occasionally that happens, too, when we’re saying “I told you it wasn’t Wrigley Field. That’s not in Germany. You should have let me answer.”
“Well, you were about to lay there until time ran out.”
“That’s when you say ‘repeat’! Remember? She goes over this every night.”
Which, I guess, is why this thing happened yesterday. I said, “Alexa, what time does Alabama play on Saturday?”
And she said (and I’m not making this up), “According to the Mayo Clinic, Alzheimers is a disease that affects brain cells.”
She continued her oration for about the length of time it takes to watch a royal funeral. She’s kind of a know-it-all like that.
She and Bullwinkle should get together.
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