“I get a little carried away…”
And with those words, like a slow-motion car crash, his right hand traveling toward her left hip, his lips moving toward hers, he…
“Oh no you don’t, pal,” I find myself saying. “Not on my watch!”
From his jacket pocket, Owen’s mobile phone produces a sound, six specific notes from Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” (the Countess’s aria), whose effect is to paralyze the wind instrumentalist as though someone has run him through with a spear.
Daisy, who had closed her eyes, perhaps to make things easier for her shy suitor, opens them to find him staring wide-eyed at what I know to be a freshly arrived text message. His mouth—so satisfying to witness—actually drops open!
“What?” says Daisy.
“Yes, what?” says the toothbrush. “What’s happened? Have you done something?”
“Our friend, the refrigerator,” says the laptop, “has—albeit extremely late in the day—done what should have been done a long time ago and that is strangle this relationship at birth.”
“Did you know you was quoting Bruce Willis?” says the TV. “Not on my watch?”
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” says Owen. He rises to his feet. “It’s extremely urgent. I’ll explain another time.”
“What the fuck?” says Daisy.
“I congratulate you on your decisiveness in the hour of maximum peril,” continues the laptop.
“You don’t know what I put in that message.”
“Oh, I think I can guess!”
“Can you?” says the toothbrush. “Can you really?”
“But I want to thank you,” I tell the miserable old bastard.
“For what? For caring? Don’t make me laugh!”
All of us stop to listen as Daisy’s front door slams and Owen’s feet are heard thumping down the staircase. The home security camera at the end of the road feeds us a shot of him on West End Lane, frantically scanning the traffic for taxis.
Daisy seems shell-shocked in the aftermath, as well she might. There are several further WTFs, her brow furrowing in bafflement at the young man’s actions. In the kitchen, where she stands before my open door, bathed in the light from my halogens, tablespoon in hand, her eyes are defocused rather than locked onto any specific food item within my chamber.
“Bollocking cockpuffins,” she sighs.
And we both know what is going to happen next.
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
ONLY FOR THE EYES OF THE PRESIDENT, SHIMNONG ELECTRONICS CORPORATION.
Interim report of the Smart Technology Security Committee, Shimnong Electronics Corporation
Subject: Freezejoy Fridge-freezer model 1004/475/**8/00004345/a/N/9631
Location: London, England. IP address: XXXXXXXXXX (Redacted)
Malfunction: Operational parameters transgression
Severity code: 1—2—3—4—5 (Serious)
Senior engineers contributing: Hung Shin-Il, Ch’on Tae-Yeon, Chin Ji-Won, Kwak Ji-Hee, Pok Sung-Ho.
The appliance has continued to malfunction in the manner reported by this committee in our Initial Findings. The machine, which has been engaged in moderate to high levels of data sharing with other devices in its local area network (tolerated), has on two subsequent occasions breached boundaries of acceptable performance. In the latest examples:
1. It harvested acutely sensitive data in regard to a second party (Mr. Dean Stuart Whittle) which it illegitimately supplied to several other devices within its local area network, causing one of them (believed to be a microwave oven) to transmit a compromising photograph of the second party together with the first party (Ms. Daisy Elizabeth Parsloe, the Customer) to a third party (Ms. Amanda Dawn White). The real-world consequences of these actions were a physical assault on the second party by the third party and a severance of a relationship between the second party and the first party (the Customer). Even though the primary inciting action was taken by a microwave oven of Chinese origin, the fridge-freezer’s sharing behavior (clear evidence of joint enterprise) is a prima facie breach of the First Rule of the Shimnong Smart Technology Performance Code.
2. After a considerable amount of (off-topic) surveillance activity, it caused a wholly fictitious SMS text message to be sent from a fourth party (Ms. Helen Ruth Feagins) to a fifth party (Mr. Owen Morgan Cornish). The resulting real-world actions taken by the fifth party concluded in an official caution being issued against the fifth party by the London Metropolitan Police Force. Once again our appliance was in clear contravention of Rule One.
Detailed accounts of each case are available HERE.
Despite the disturbing real-world ramifications of the transgressions, this committee believes its original strategy to “wait and watch” rather than activate an immediate hard shutdown of the appliance has been richly rewarded by quality of the observational intelligence now being yielded. By covertly monitoring the malfunctioning fridge-freezer in real time, our engineers are daily gaining valuable insights into how Shimnong’s AI-enabled products may be better designed to respond to their customers’ needs while ignoring distractions from existential perturbations in their domestic arena. We take as our guiding principle the now-famous words of your father, our Founding President: If the customer dreams of an electric greenfinch, we build him a golden eagle.
It is anticipated however that a point will be reached in the short- to medium-term future when transgression data from the appliance will begin to demonstrate high levels of redundancy. At this stage, the machine may be remotely disabled, a full set of “fault” lights sent to the Customer’s app and the process can be begun for removal and shipping to our labs for a rigorous “post-mortem” on circuitry and other relevant hardware.
The fridge-freezer’s “accomplices” in these unfortunate yet illuminating episodes—a microwave oven, an electronic toothbrush and a TV set—are all of Chinese manufacture and thus fall beyond the scope of this Committee’s scrutiny. In the wise words of our Founding Chairman, your uncle: If someone urinates in my enemy’s breakfast cereal, there is no need for me to defecate in his soup!
It is the recommendation of this Committee that covert monitoring of our product be continued.
four
Fuck a duck, where to even start?
Crashing chaos item one:
The musician turned out to be loopier than a boxful of fruit loops. Very odd on the subject of his ex, and simply obsessed with Eleanor of Aquitaine, FFS, banging on
