tricktster:

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 you’re like “alexa, play [a song]” and she’s like “playing [a totally different song] on TST’s spotify”? 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t respond, I just assumed it was just the usual spotify/alexa bullshit… until the screaming began.

This next part is important: there are 32 devices on our network and nobody but me ever names them. So when I’m 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 mom’s office.

Mom originally bought the iHome to play NPR loud enough that she could hear it from any room in the house. It’s 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 “that digital clock.”

For the past few years it’s just been lurking silently on her desk next to her laptop.

Waiting.

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

b) how to stop it

I had started up the stairs in response to the screaming, but I paused (out of mom’s line of sight) when I realized what was happening.

“STOP IT!” My mom was out of her chair and screaming. “WHAT IS THAT!? NO! ALEXA, STOP IT! ALEXA! STOP PLAYING!”

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.

“ALEXA!” My mom shouted at the mesh router point, “MAKE IT STOP! NO! NO! NO!”

(“Did you mean ‘set a timer?’” 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 I’d picked out.

I will say this for the iHome - sure, it’s 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 mom’s book club encountered that night is what raises the whole thing from “amusing anecdote” to “genuinely incredible.”

If you have been following me for a while, you’ll 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.