Where's my damn medal?

So, reading with interest the new plan Amazon’s got to eventually deliver packages with drones. Please oh, please, let this plan not ever come to fruition while I still walk the earth. I’d have to wear a helmet every time I left the house. Avoidance subroutines, schmubroutines, have you MET me? Or read this blog? I do a daily dance of death with my cats in the kitchen, hallways and living room as both of our avoidance subroutines clash and conflict. My brain and spotty synapses can circumvent any logical and effective avoidance programming on this earth. Let me show you the scars on my ankles from the Roomba. I’d come out of the house and there’d be the drone headed for my door, all peaceably like. And we’d be fine. Except then while I was looking at the drone, I’d accidentally step into MommaCat’s water bowl, lose my balance and lurch to the side, which the drone would niftily dodge. Except nothing in its programming could possibly anticipate that I’d over-compensate for falling, and come lurching back in the other direction, which the drone would just barely adjust for…but then be doomed when I bounced off the railing (do everything with maximum force is my motto) and came back again and then, well, it’s hair full of rotors, isn’t it?

I’m just bummed that it’s in the news now. Because if this were right before Halloween, I’d have drones caught in the giant spiderweb, being eaten by carnivorous plants, being grabbed by the giant Chicken man, a heap of them smouldering, courtesy of dry ice, in the birdbath, carefully watched by bird skeletons, impaled on tombstones, caught in ghost tendrils….and I, of course, would be dressed as a this decade’s Tippi Hedren. (Look it up children, Tippi Birds Hitchcock)

I am no more competent when it comes to passwords. For starters, my fingertips have some property that not only makes them pretty non-reactive to touch screens – seriously, my future will include surgery to insert conductive chips in my fingertips so that I can continue to function in a touchscreen world – but also eats away at the letters on a keyboard. M, N, V, and B are particularly vulnerable. And you can probably tell right away, that any temporary password I’m going to get includes….MNVB in some combination. As a touch typist, albeit one that yes, can type without looking at the keyboard, but engages the backspace key and retypes probably half the letters struck, I suppose that would be the idiot-savant version of touch typist – I can mistype and retype words very quickly. Typing them correctly in the first place? Not likely. So, to address this password problem, where you really can’t engage your touch typist brain. (Well, I can’t. I type words, not letters and have no idea what my fingers are doing really.) But when I look down to hunt and peck, hmm, all of these blank keys….but hey, I engaged the big brain and viola! I printed out an image of a keyboard and keep that tucked underneath the real one. Ha! So, there.

(Please note, viola, as opposed to voila, is purposeful. Because it’s funny. Typed. Not spoken. Trust me on this one.)

( So, you want to know why I deserve a medal right? )