She who must not be named

Our life, as you may have gathered from your avid reading of these posts, is a confusing mix of technology and creativity, fitted around a number of domestic and canine responsibilities.

The last fortnight has been further complicated by an uncle with cancer, currently at the mercy of a caring but overstretched NHS,  parents celebrating a 65th Wedding anniversary, and a letter emphasising a financial obligation we have been trying to ignore.

The upshot of this is that I have been party cooking for England (very enjoyable and creative), obtaining quotes from builders and zooming off to the hospital on my days off.

Time has become tight, and this fact stimulated a conversation about how technology could benefit my life (in the humble opinion of my husband). We are talking about his other woman again, she who must not be named (in case she buts in to our conversation to tell us a joke, or apologise for not being able to answer a question we never asked her in the chuffing first place).

Up until today, I have been delighted to be able, vocally, to add items to my shopping list, while, with an erratic record of success, She Who Must Not Be Named has inserted some of that list into my on-line Tesco shopping cart, with no intervention from me.  As a system, it is not that reliable, sometimes the thing she adds to the list is so far removed from the item I intended that I have difficulty remembering what it should have been. On other occasions, I get the right thing but in the wrong form, so I might say, ‘She Who Must Not Be Named, add sweetcorn to my shopping list,’ and get the frozen stuff when I always buy ‘Ho ho ho Green Giant‘.

I don’t mind this complication too much, because the very fact of being able to add something to the shopping list while my hands are plunged into the washing up water, or covered in flour and pastry, is the greater part of the benefit for me. Of course Whizz was straight to the rescue anyway. The shopping would be better served, not with Tesco, who apparently pull the data from the app., but with Ocado, who push it. I think that’s right. What I mean is that instead of me adding an item to my list then Tesco fetching the instruction, I tell She Who Must Not Be Namedto ask Ocado to put an item into my trolly. In this way, stocks and options are checked by Ocado before the request is processed.

She Who Must Not Be Named gets quite chatty during the process. ‘How does this sound.’ she asks, ‘Green Giant sweetcorn four pack?’

I can ask for alternatives and she will offer them, and when I have the item I want I say, ‘Yes’, and she asks if I want to add anything else, and so it continues. She gets a little belligerent if, as I did when I couldn’t get the words out, or the options she was offering were not suitable, I simply said ‘Stop’

‘OK,’ she spat, ‘Goodbye,’

The next time, I tried being more polite and said, ‘Thank you,’ when she got an item right.

She asked ‘Did you say thank you?’

‘Yes’ I replied to which she said ‘I’m sorry, I can’t find an item called thank you.’

It’s all about the language, you see. She needs to be asked using exactly the right terminology, without repetition, hesitation or deviation. Attempting to order Splenda Minis (artificial sweetener tablets) I said ‘Splenda Millie…’ then corrected to ‘Minnies’,

‘Sorry, she replied, ‘I can’t find Splenda Millie-Minnies.’ Whizz and I got the giggles, which confused her even further. From this day forth those tablets will be known in our family as Millie-Minnies.

And  another saying enters our (for some) already baffling family vocabulary.

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