Tech Horror
Everyday technology turned wrong: voicemails, robot vacuums, streaming apps, CAPTCHAs, phone lines and email threads. The devices we let into the house are always listening, and sometimes something answers.
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Self-Guided Tour
Welcome to the Ashcombe House, a historic home museum preserved exactly as the family left it in 1891. Please collect a headset from the front desk. Enter the number posted in each room to hear about it.
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Please Stay on the Line
After my father died, I spent a week in his house closing his accounts. The last one was the landline he'd had since 1974. The phone company's automated system said it could only cancel service with the account holder.
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Select All Squares
The login page for a client's server asked me to prove I wasn't a robot. Select all squares with traffic lights. I got it wrong, so it gave me another one. Select all squares with the man in the doorway.
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[inaudible]
I transcribe focus-group recordings for a market research firm. The rule is verbatim: you type everything you can hear. In the files from one facility, there's someone talking under the room tone.
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You Have Four Saved Messages
My grandmother moved into memory care in the spring. She calls me most nights and leaves long, wandering voicemails. Lately she's been talking about a nice young man who visits her after lights-out, and how much he knows about my apartment.
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Continue Watching
A new show turned up in the Continue Watching row on our TV. Season 1, Episode 4. Neither of us had ever heard of it. The thumbnail was our kitchen, from up near the ceiling, at night.
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RE: Updated Seating Chart (4th Floor)
An email thread forwarded to us by a reader who used to work in claims processing. It begins with the most boring message ever sent in an office, and a desk nobody can account for.
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Thermal
Every winter I count elk from a helicopter over the Idaho backcountry with a thermal camera. Elk show up as bright white shapes on the snow. On a ridge above the Lochsa, the camera showed twenty-three shapes standing in a circle, and they were not elk.
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Same Name, Same Number
Nine days out of Honolulu on a solo delivery, my chartplotter showed another boat two miles ahead of me on the AIS. It had my boat's name and my boat's identification number, and it was sitting exactly where I would be in six hours.
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Room 7
My robot vacuum builds a map of my house with a laser. My house has six rooms. The map has seven, and every night at 2 a.m. the vacuum spends forty minutes cleaning the one that isn't there.
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Where Are Your Parents
When I was eleven in Tacoma, every kid on our street knew a phone number you could call to find out exactly where your parents were right now. It was always right. I collected what other people remember about it.