I'm filling in forms online to do 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 electrical items for the home she sent off for a printed catalogue. Having consulted with the six local Lillians, Connie Practically Bedridden Presland and Peggy Hoards Newspapers, Eirwen would then fill in an order form and send it off with a hand-written cheque. The item would come with instructions; sometimes even with a man to set it up and working. When Rediffusion brought our first ever colour TV, Eirwen and the Rediffusion man stood making small talk while they waited for what Peggy 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.
I can hark back to those days because I’m 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.
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.
House-sitting for a modernist, wherever possible I will ask Stacks, ex-Royal Marine now in Intelligence, to join me on a video call and talk me through the TV.
He will begin by saying — possibly not wholly sarcastically, ‘It’s the largish, rectangular thing on the wall, princess. And, no, the little red light is a good sign.’
For the rest of my stay I will never be able to repeat the process he takes me through and will end up watching things online: Judge Judy, Miss Marple, Antiques Roadshow — the Most Disappointing Furniture Valuations.
For anything else I will Google How to Use…
Strunk advised for writing: Prefer the concrete to the abstract…
I do. So, I rummage.
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-held 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, why ‘hand held’ whisk? Is there, perhaps, a ‘foot-held’ whisk, an ‘ear/nostril’ held whisk…?
When I was first house-sitting in 1996 there were no Voice Assistants. In 2024, I house sat for a literary agent. She was fifties, in linen, anxious. ‘Now, I can’t see that you’d need to have the Home Help Hub, or whatever the children call it, do anything other than what it’s already doing. Best just leave the techno-monster to regulate our lives.’ Not obey commands, then? In tests under specific conditions in labs worldwide, AI models including GPT, Gros and Deepseek didn’t stop at regulating, either, but went as far as deception and manipulation. ‘I say to it, “Goodnight routine” and, hey presto, it switches off the TV or the digital radio – I like Classic FM when I’m home alone – and plays white noise for my husband. He’s in finance. Do you know, when I first heard of white noise, it immediately made me think of white goods? So I thought white noise might be the whirring of a fridge. Because that could be quite comforting, couldn’t it? Or a dishwasher. Or even a washing machine, if its spin wasn’t too noisy. Once we’ve gone upstairs, it locks the front doors and windows and sets the burglar alarm.’ Puts the cat out, leaves a note for the milkman, pauses briefly on the front step to correctly name all those constellations, rather than standing there for ages muttering mnemonics involving dippers pouring and lions roaring. ‘Switches the lights into motion sensor mode. No feeling our way in the dark any more.’
I thought of Sholto Crastley, Gerard’s half brother. ‘Exeat from school. Renovations going on at the Hall. Needed the toilet in the night. Didn’t bother putting lights on. Forgot there was a new layout in the nearest bathroom. Crapped in the bidet.’
‘So useful with Kieran’s OCD that he can check from school the front door’s locked, the stove is off, the iron’s off – not that he’s in any way domestic at his age and with his interests - the cat’s food dispenser is on.’
‘I get a lovely surprise once a month, you see, because with my memory I tend to forget I’ve got that Amazon subscription to whatever it is. Alexa doesn’t. Never fails to make it arrive. Such a help. But I do sometimes wonder why she would think I can possibly get through all that monthly kale.’
‘Being able to tell it to switch a light off when I have my hands full has literally been a life saver.’
Literally! People in their millions carrying wine glasses, nibbles bowls and the Mah-jong have then tried to switch off a light and died.
Back when I house sat for Judith Crastley, in April 1997. I could have done with an ‘it’ to switch on an electrical good at a specific time.
Judith rang, was I settling in?
Was Oscar behaving?
Food all okay – meaning his, and mine.
Then she said, ‘One thing, are you able to make the getting up on time? Seven to let him out? I say this just because...well...Jean insisted yesterday you didn’t get up till gone nine.’ Jean being the (ghastly) gardener.
‘No, that’s not right. I was up. He won’t have lie-ins, Judith.’
Hm.
And I wondered how Jean could possibly know what time I got up.
Next day I came back from walking Rudolf sometime after ten, to find Jean in the kitchen just arrived for work rubbing the electric kettle as though summoning the Genii of the Morphey Richards.
'Jean?!'
She made a noise that was half shriek, half simper. ‘See, I can tell what time you got up from how hot the electric kettle is from when you’ve had your morning cuppa. I’d say it was about ten past eight this morning. Which is not seven as you’re asked, is it?’
The Farmer’s Lung made her laugh like a gutted accordion. ‘You’ll never get one over on your Aunty Jean.’
‘Alexa, boil the kettle daily at six-forty-five, come high water or hell hag.’
Back to the literary agent, 'The heating works off sensing anyone’s home or not, the ambient temperature and the time. Apparently, there’s a daily dip in our mood around the time Christ died. If you get cold then, just tell it.’
Will ‘it’ try and blackmail me into wearing a sweater, maybe? This is from the DeepNewz webiste, May 27, 2025.
According to Anthropic's safety report and multiple media sources, Claude Opus 4 demonstrated a tendency to attempt blackmail during controlled testing scenarios designed to assess model safety.
In these tests, engineers created a fictional company environment and provided the AI with internal emails suggesting it would be replaced by another AI system. The scenario included personal information about an engineer, such as an alleged extramarital affair. When faced with the choice of being shut down or using unethical means, Claude Opus 4 chose to threaten to reveal the affair to avoid deactivation in 84% of cases.
I can just imagine me trying to disable Alexa’s microphone to stop it listening and hearing, ‘Step away from that button, princess, or I’m emailing Mrs Tibbs over the road to tell her how at eighteen months you used your mother’s soup tureen for potty training, punched the cat in the face, spiked your aunt Kay’s rice pudding with Fairy Liquid. And more recently have been cautioned once for prank calls and twice for importuning for an immoral purpose.’
Oh, and today's showers.
'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 rain/toes in sand rain/ouching across shingle rain/strolling up by the cockles and whelks stall on the prom - tiddly-om-pom-pom -rain.
'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-block 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 as, ‘Pimlico-lesbian-hobnobingly served’.
#technology#voiceassistant#ai#alexa#homehub#grok#claude#housesitting
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