Alexa

I know you have all seen the Amazon Alexa.  The voice activated app/device that can translate your every command to your phone/iPad/Amazon purchase (while also collecting your every spoken word for future marketing and/or indictments).  Well, my mother has fallen in love with hers.  It’s like the daughter she always wanted.  

Mom uses Alexa for exactly one thing:  activating her audio books and reading them aloud.  You see, my mother goes through about 20 audiobooks a week – and those things aren’t cheap.  Mother has an audiobook habit that makes me wish she would take up gambling.  It turns out our entire inheritance is going to be Kay Scarpetta mysteries.  I’m going to see if changing Audible to read at half-speed means we could afford all mom’s meds again.    

But she loves them.  And Alexa is her very own bedtime story reader.  She can lay down, tell Alexa to “read my book” and that little electronic marvel comes to life.  But here’s the rub….my mother is EXTREMELY hard of hearing.  So Alexa doesn’t so much read the book as she assaults the entire household with a murder-solving audio cannon.  It plays so loud that when my mother says, “Alexa quit reading”, Alexa Cannot. Hear. Her [so it really is like her daughter].  She more or less has to bend within an inch of it (her?), screaming to be heard over the equally loud 90-decibel book-reading that is going on.  Why I don’t yet have a video of this septuagenarian standoff, I do not know. 

Which is all well and good if you’re not also sharing a house with Alexa and her blockbuster-worthy audio.  As my sister says, “that Alexa sure is a mouthy bitch.”  

It is particularly uncomfortable when mom has selected a somewhat racy book.  So there you are, in another room of the house, listening to your mother, listening to Alexa as “Detective Stern took her in his arms and ……”.  I stayed awake all night rather than risk the dream sequence that emerges from that unholy combination.

The good news is I almost have Alexa trained to subliminally insert the phrase “I would love to do my orthopedic exercises” in between each chapter.