So the other night my mom was upstairs on a zoom call with The Council of Retired White Moms (her book club) , my dad was downstairs working out, and my brother and I were cleaning up the kitchen, which obviously requires a soundtrack.
Now, you know how sometimes youâre like âalexa, play [a song]â and sheâs like âplaying [a totally different song] on TSTâs spotifyâ? or maybe she just decides to play literally nothing instead? My workaround has always been to select the Echo as thr output device in the spotify app. It works like 80% of the time.
As such, when Alexa couldnât manage to play my great kitchen cleaning jam on the night at issue, I opened spotify, selected the kitchen echo, and pressed play. When the Echo didnât respond, I just assumed it was just the usual spotify/alexa bullshit... until theďżź screaming began.
This next part is important: there are 32 devices on our network and nobody but me ever names them. So when Iâm selecting a device to play spotify on, I have to pick the right speaker out from a long list of random alphanumeric gibberish. I usually guess right, but I do occasionally fuck it up. Accordingly, it came to pass that I had not told Spotify to play my music on the kitchen echo; I had actually selected the iHome in my momâs office.
Mom originally bought the iHome to play NPR loud enough that she could hear it from any room in the house. Itâs not a smart speaker, though, and mom (like the majority of boomers) prefers to use voice commands. Once she got her own Echo, she just basically forgot about the iHome. More importantly, she forgot how to use it, and then, it seems, forgot that it was a speaker system at all - a few weeks prior to the events of this story, I was trying to troubleshoot her computer and had a private and very sensible chuckle to myself when she incidentally referred to it as âthat digital clock.â
For the past few years itâs just been lurking silently on her desk next to her laptop.
As a result, when the iHome unexpectedly lurched back to life at its customary maximum volume, neither my mother nor the 25+ other Women of a Certain Age in her book club had any idea of:
a) where the music was coming from, or
I had started up the stairs in response to the screaming, but I paused (out of momâs line of sight) when I realized what was happening.
âSTOP IT!â My mom was out of her chair and screaming. âWHAT IS THAT!? NO! ALEXA, STOP IT! ALEXA! STOP PLAYING!â
A greek chorus of distraught book club attendees was echoing her sentiments over the laptop speakers, the monitor displaying the horrified face of each speaker in incredibly rapid succession.
âALEXA!â My mom shouted at the mesh router point, âMAKE IT STOP! NO! NO! NO!â
(âDid you mean âset a timer?ââ the Echo in her bedroom asked politely.)
The song, naturally, did not stop, and mom did not think to mute her laptop or pull the power cord from the iHome. Instead, she whirled around several times held her arms out in a sort of T-pose, as if she could physically stop the book club attendees from hearing the song Iâd picked out.
I will say this for the iHome - sure, itâs old tech, but even at max volume, the lyrics could be understood with perfect clarity.
Now, this would have probably been funny regardless of the song I had chosen as my kitchen clean-up jam. I know that. But the actual song that my momâs book club encountered that night is what raises the whole thing from âamusing anecdoteâ to âgenuinely incredible.â
If you have been following me for a while, youâll know that I tend to think of myself as a real prankster. A rascal, a scamp, a jester of a woman. I have engineered a few comedic misadventures in my day. But I have to be humble here... what I unintentionally accomplished that night was so much funnier than anything I have ever done on purpose. It was the absolute apex of comedy.
The song I had chosen, dear readers, was WAP.
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