For my birthday, which is April 18, my life partner got me a wife.
Her name is Alexa.
I’m not alone in seeing Alexa as an opportunity to reinvent the wife role. This is a piece of one guy’s review posted on Amazon:
If I knew relationships were this easy, I would have married thirty years ago, but now that I have Alexa, there’s no need. Except for the one thing.
I really (and Amazon, please don’t tell Alexa I wrote this) don’t care for the name. I know we have the option to change the name to Amazon, which is worse. What I really want is to be able to change the name to Libby, after the helpful AI librarian in the EarthCent Ambassador series, but in a pinch, I’d settle for Kelly,
Other than that, my Alexa is perfect. Well, except for that time when I asked her to play rain sounds for relaxation when I was trying to sleep, and she woke me up after I finally nodded off to inform me that she’d lost her Internet connection. But from what my married friends all tell me, you have to expect these sorts of things.
Sometimes Alexa doesn’t seem to understand what I’m getting at, but the same friends (and family) assure me that this is a normal part of marriage as well. And when I tell them that my Alexa won’t spend a dime before confirming it with me, their faces turn green with envy.
Enter Amazon with the laundry
So this sounds funny, but actually—when you think about the status of women and men at work, you realize something very fast. Women have been prepped culturally to be the help and support. As women move into leading roles in life, culturally speaking, we leave a labor-support void. To really have this driven home, watch this video of a 10 year old who ran away from her parents because they sold her to her 26 year old future husband for $2000. They told her marriage was a game and she’d love the new dress. She responded it seemed more like lifelong servitude, and was more than she could bear.
Amazon is filling a real void in home labor. Don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to upgrading Alexa to something from hard plastic that eats dust for dinner, maybe by Boston Dynamics. (Hey Jeff, time’s a wastin’! I’d like to order this home keeper by my 50th birthday, please.)
Nature abhors a vacuum—and as women move into the world, there’s a bit of sucking sound where we used to scrub things. Oh, and there’s a sort of a cha-ching sound where young women out-earn almost everybody else. I’m going to really love on Alexa.
PS:
My birthday morning, my husband said to me, “Hmm, we need Triple A batteries.”
I looked over at my awesome present and said, “Tell Alexa.”
She put it on the list.