The Alexa Hub...ay, there's the rub...

I'm filling in forms online to do some house-sitting. 

Question. How comfortable are you with using different types of home appliances and technology? In addition to keeping the property safe and secure, home owners would expect you to be able to use electrical appliances as and when required, also any security systems and smart home devices. Would this be an issue for you? 

Example answer (as given online): 

I was loading our family dishwasher from age seven. At age ten, I graduated to the washing machine. The oven came at age fourteen making scones with my grandmother. (Who pronounced the word of this loveliest of baked goods: sconn. But let’s not start that argument.) As I am in my late twenties – first Saturn Return getting underway, peeps - I pretty much grew up online, so am good to go with smart home devices and similar. When buying anything she calls ‘ether-technological’ my aunt Nelly will still wait at the checkout for them to give her an instruction manual. I know to google for anything of that kind.

My own answer: 

When Eirwen, my mother, bought electricals for the home she sent off for a printed catalogue. Having invited the six Lillians, Connie Practically Bedridden Presland and the still-living Mair round to huddle, bubble, toil and trouble helping her choose, Eirwen would then fill in an order form in black ink and send it off with a hand-written cheque. The item would arrive with an instruction manual. Sometimes even with a man who would set the item up and working. When Rediffusion brought our first colour TV,  Eirwen and the delivery man stood making small talk waiting for what Mair called the ‘catheter’ tubes to warm up, Eirwen possibly asking her classic ice-breaker questions, ‘Does your mother knit?’ ‘Have you ever thought of washing that uniform?’ ‘Do you call Number Twos Doo-doos or Ah-ahs?’

Possibly.

But then, I’m going at the age of my second Saturn Return. The planet of Life Lessons is as of this year back travelling direct through my chart. And, again, as with my first Return, I’ve moved town, gained a completely new social circle, changed (a hugely consequential aspect of my) job.

I am not tech savant. My grey hairs are so far on their way to the grave they're meeting themselves coming back from Bargoed cemetery. 

House-sitting for a modernist, wherever necessary (and possible) I will ask Stacks, ex-Royal Marine now in Intelligence, to join me on a video call and talk me through the house-sittee's TV. 

He will begin by saying – possibly not wholly sarcastically, ‘It’s the largish, rectangular thing on the wall. And, no, the little red light is a good sign.’ 

Then for the rest of my stay will never be able to repeat the process, and end up watching things online: Judge Judy, Miss Marple, Antiques Roadshow - the Most Disappointing Furniture Valuations.

For anything else in the house I search online for How to Use...

And I rummage. As Strunk advised for writing: Prefer the concrete to the abstract. 

Excellent - a cleaver rather than my having to brave the Moulinex as reimagined by Isaac Asimov.

Oh, goody, a cafetiere. Rather than my having to grapple with that artisan/steampunk thing, like Caractacus Potts’s take on a brutalist Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car.

Oh, frabjous day! Calooh! Callay! - a hand whisk to spin between my palms, rather than fail to froth my single batch Cacao hot chocolate using the spindly, shrunken-Dyson-looking torque malarkey.

Apropos, please, is there a foot whisk, a cleavage whisk, a perineum whisk, other whatnot whisk?

I remember for the first time seeing a kettle with a digital temperature indicator. A hundred degrees for tea, ninety-seven for coffee, eighty-six for a Parvati goddess of fertility yarrow and damiana porridge poultice. 

Or something. 

And, oh, what price these heating hubs? I recently walked too close to one house-sitting in Brighton and it bleeped me through its myriad settings from Plutonian to Sun’s Core. 

Which leads us to...

The showers of today.

Alexa, I'm sure I'd love to - as who wouldn't? - discuss with you your preternaturally comprehensive selection of stream settings: rain, full body, jet, massage; and your mists: Goddess/ghostly/gauzy dusk/thin haze like cigarette smoke ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins tapering delicately needle-topped, Empire State's taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven. (With apologies there - mine, not yours, Alexa, to Allen Ginsberg.) 

Not to mention your positively minisculitively differentiated water qualities: beach rain, with its sub-selection: over sea/toes in sand/ouching across shingle/strolling up by the cockles and whelks stall on the prom, tiddly-om-pom-pom. 

Oh, and your water qualities - aren't you just the uber-dab hand at this AI generated assistant malarkey - Amazon rain, Appalachian Springs, of Babylon fame, Embryonic Niagara Falls. 

And, and your chock-a-blockish in-folder subset of coding statements comprising cleansing, exfoliating, toning, tightening, buffing, tattoo enhancing, keloid scar camouflaging, Kama Sutra meets keyhole surgery.

I am bedazzled - possibly skeddadled? - yay, positively vajazelled by your manifestly bounteous, gloriously multiplous, curvettically [I think you've made up some of these words. ed.] divisioning latitudinously, longitudifically [yup...ed] beyond all encompassingly impeccable supremacy.

Really, I am. 

But please, Alexa, I want some less.

Can my shower be simply hottish, fallingish, H20ish?

Talking of Alexa, who knew the hub where I was house-sitting in Haringey was hooked up to the hub where my house-sittees had gone to visit their ageing mother in Guernsey. And who knew my actress mate Lizzie would tell me the fun thing to do with Alexa. ‘She is programmed never to swear or say anything dirty, Iestyn. But if you get her to officially “announce” something, no matter how sweary and naughty boy you get, she will play back exactly what you say.’

My house-sittee’s ageing Guernsey resident mother actually went down to the dining room, hearing me announce lunch was, ‘Piss-arseingly, wank-wipingly, flaps-saggingly, Pimlico-lesbian-hobnobingly served’.