My partner has banned Roombas from our house. This seems particularly unfair to me, as we both hate vacuuming, have long hair and he’s been rhapsodizing about getting a St. Bernard for months. I do vacuum, I really do, but after a couple of days you can walk through our house and start a pretty decent fire with what you find between your toes.
“No robots in the house,” he tells me firmly.
“It’s a vacuuming robot,” I argue lamely.
“Still a robot."
I’m with him on his refusal to purchase an Alexa helper, as I want no one to know how obsessed I am with narwhals and how old every actress is (what, she’s also 30? Perhaps I could also still become the next Meryl Streep. It’s not a sound line of reasoning, I know this, but it’s the way I think), and feel like she would burst in with reports of these things every time we had company. But I feel that the banning of Roombas is a little much, mostly because I do ninety percent of the vacuuming and the ten percent that Kyle does is because he dumped sawdust somewhere unlikely—like the kitchen pantry or the guest bathroom—and is now trying to hide it.
“Is this flour?” I’ll ask him later, dragging my toes through the residue near the refrigerator.
“Sawdust,” he’ll admit, not looking at me. “I was building a shelf.”
“For the kitchen? Where is it.”
“No, for my van.”
“Isn’t your van in the garage?”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
But Kyle has this notion, I guess, that such a robot might be collecting data about us and sending it out who knows where.
“So you don’t want the world to know the dimensions of our living room? You snob you,” I chastise him jokingly.
“Who knows, it could be listening to us,” he says shrugging.
“I see. You don’t want the world to know that we’re still obsessed with LCD Sound System. How big should I make your tinfoil hat sir?”
To this, he gives me no reply, because we both know I don’t deserve one.
But then, if that’s what he’s really worried about, shouldn’t we get rid of our phones too?
“They’re not robots, they’re tiny computers. And I use mine for work,” he argues when I bring this up. Then he gives me a pointed look, as he no longer has a personal phone because some asshole never checks pants pockets before they put them in the wash. I have literally laundered so much money that it’s probably a felony.
“Are you using it for work when you check the sports scores when we’re out for dinner?” I say insolently.
“I only do that when it’s a really important game because otherwise you will threaten to put the thing in your wine glass.”
“Maybe you should get a waterproof phone.”
“You’d back over it with your car,” he says exasperated.
“Would not.” But I probably would if I felt ignored enough.
We’re both from that generation before cellphones, and when we did finally get them (me at nineteen, him at seventeen) we were dubious about their uses for anything other than the ability that they gave our parents to keep tabs on us.
The first smartphone didn’t come out until the year I graduated, and I’m still dubious about the practicality of something that can ruin my day moments after I’ve woken up with a steady stream of notifications of rejection letters. So I treat mine like a paperweight, to the point that Kyle has begun to threaten to install a landline.
“Why can’t you ever pick up the phone during the day?” he asks me.
“Because I find it distracting when I’m working.”
“But what if there’s an emergency?”
“That seems unlikely,” I say shrugging.
“I could fall down an elevator shaft.”
“I really prefer not to think about that,” I say, thinking of all the times that my mother has texted just to let me know that she’s praying for my partner in his ‘very dangerous line of work’. “Come on,” I say, “if you were in real trouble I’m the last person you’d call.”
“Charming, though true,” he says, clearly tired of having this conversation. “Assuredly you must take breaks and look at your phone.”
“Sometimes,” I agree, but this usually ends with me googling random things and wasting time, so I plug it in to charge in another room and forget about it.
I also have this theory that when I’m old I won’t be fondly thinking back to the oodles of time I spent on my phone trying to figure out whether Jennifer Lawrence was a natural blonde, but it’s the books that I’ll remember fondly, even if they were Jennifer Lawrence’s autobiographies. I think this because I am an elitist, and elitist from a swamp who, when drunk, has to be really be careful not to say the words “Get ‘er done.” So, it’s unfair of me to judge anyone else, but I do, and often.
When I’m at work and serving couples, I’m always astounded when they sit through a meal on their phones, looking up only to ask me for another beer. I’d be offended. It would be like a friend bringing a quilt and several squares that they planned to patch together while we had coffee. But phones are small. And I guess because they’re small it’s somehow acceptable to sit in front of someone taking selfies while they look patiently at the part of your face that your cellphone doesn’t cover.
It’s odd to feel like I’m lucky because I have a partner that doesn’t do this to me (except maybe once an evening during hockey playoffs, and that I can live with), but I do. I mean, I put on makeup for the guy, so it’s nice that he actually looks at it instead of liking the selfie that I took for the occasion later.
I know that all of this makes me sound old, and not unlike someone who’s about to move out to the woods and write a manifesto. But I’m also getting to that place where I don’t really care, where I can forgo having a robot vacuum my living room in exchange for having a partner who is looking at me in the exact moment that I start to develop a new zit. Even if, at any moment it does feel like a bird is going to fly in one of our open windows and begin nesting in our carpet.
