by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology Writer
It has become a common truism that there is more computing power in your Home Tableware Hygiene System (HTHS) than there was in the room-sized mainframe machines that ushered in the computer age. But, when you’ve finished laughing at the misfortune of people who didn’t have the good sense to live in our modern age, you might want to contemplate a simple question.
What’s the big wup?
Sure, the computer in your sink (actually, a series of chips at different strategic places in your sink) can tell you the exact temperature of the water coming out of the tap to the nearest tenth of a degree. So, what? When was the last time you thought to yourself: “Gee, the water’s a little chilly. I need to turn the heat up three tenths of a degree?”
And, sure, sensors around the rim of the sink can warn you if the water level is getting too high. However, when you’ve had to leave the kitchen to deal with Rover having shocked himself (because, for the fifth time, he has found the vibrator you clearly haven’t hidden well enough), you’re going to have to mop the kitchen floor yet again. Short of finding some other way to get your jollies, nothing was going to prevent that; certainly not a digitized sink.
And, also sure, the sink can tell you if you need to add more soap for maximum dishes cleanliness. But, honestly, who needs a bossy sink? That’s what you have a husband for.
Ultimately, you have to wonder if such devices are making our lives better.
“Absolutely!” exclaimed Wired columnist Clive Thompson.
“Absolutely not!” retorted the late Neil Postman, author of, among other books, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.
Okay, then. Having dispensed with the journalistic fiction of allowing both sides to be represented, we can now attempt to actually answer the question. So, is the world really a better place because we have computer-operated sinks?
“I have my doubts,” said Salvatore Aeshus, part-time acoustic tile engineer for NASA and full-time ordinary person. “The thing came with a 124 page manual – 124 pages! I spent several hours reading it, and I still couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn thing on!”
Aeshus said that he eventually got so fed up with the HTHS that he took his dirty dishes and cutlery and washed them in the pool in the basement of his condo. “Sure, the tenants who were in the pool at the time weren’t very supportive,” Aeshus admitted. “Still, when I explained to them what had happened, a lot of them stopped saying they were going to complain to the condo management board. Those were the ones who got it.”
“Sure, new technologies have a learning curve,” Thompson allowed. “You can’t drive to your corner grocer’s without learning how to work a car. But, most people feel being able to avoid walking the two and half blocks is worth several months of study and practice. When they realize the benefits of the Home Tableware Hygiene System, I’m sure most people will feel the same way about it.”
“For most of human history, human beings beat their dirty dishes on rocks by the stream to get them cleaned,” Postman, very loquacious for a dead man, retorted. “This was both good physical exercise and the occasion for important social interactions among villagers, not to mention great for the economy, given that dishes had to be replaced so frequently. When they realize that their fingers will never again have to get pruney because they have spent too much time in dishwater, I’m sure most people will feel that the things they have lost because of this new technology are more important than the things they have gained.”
Pablo Escobar, Chief Technology Poobah of HTHS Technologies, the wholly owned subsidiary of MultinatCorp that produces digital sinks, commented, “We just hope that consumers will appreciate that the time the Home Tableware Hygiene System saves them in doing dishes is time that could be better spent ignoring their families. Really, with this technology, everybody wins.”
“Nice use of balancing quotes from both sides, by the way,” Escobar added.