When the company came by, they were impressed by our überclean house and our high-end taste in beverage containers. Dinner was going normally, meaning we were all sitting around the table making small talk while we ate. Then my little sister picked up her half-eaten slice and yelled,
There’s probably a proper etiquette for what to do when one finds an arachnid on one’s pizza, but whatever that etiquette was, my little sister didn’t know it. All conversation at the table stopped and everyone looked at her to see whether she really did have a spider on her pizza or whether she’d just mistaken some sort of spice for a spider.
(There was a precedent of my sister mistaking the identity of things, so you never know.)
My mother took the slice from my sister, laughed nervously, and said, “Don’t be silly. I’m sure it’s just a piece of . . .”
Then my mother let out a half-gasp, half-gagging noise, because there was most definitely a spider on that half-eaten slice of pizza. And not one that had just wandered on while the pizza had been cooling on the counter. This spider had been cooked to a crisp. As spider deaths go, this one didn’t look like a lot of fun.
My little sister carried on for a while, you know, because she was traumatized that she’d almost eaten a baked spider. To be fair to the pizza place, they never actually said what the three meats on the three-meat pizza were.
My mom started encouraging everyone to eat the salad, but I wasn’t going to let perfectly good pizza go to waste, so I checked mine to make sure that it was spider free and continued to eat.
I mean, what were the chances that the spider brought friends with him when he decided to take that ill-fated walk on the mozzarella?
Anyway, the houseguests didn’t make a big deal about the pizza, but we all knew that this dinner would be memorable for them, and not in a good way.
After dinner, which not surprisingly ended pretty quickly, my mom insisted I take the slice of pizza back to Mama O’Malley’s to show them and get a refund on our order.
I dutifully went back to the shop, waited in line again, and told the teenage-boy-pizza-artist what the problem was. Perhaps the most frightening part of the story is that he didn’t seem all that shocked or disgusted. He just pulled out a book that dealt with refunds and wrote my complaint underneath a list of other people’s complaints.
At this point I was wondering if insect infestation on the pizzas was a typical thing, so while he wrote, I read everybody else’s complaints.
I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that everyone else’s complaints were minor. I mean, if I was going to get my order messed up so that I got my money back, I would have much rather gotten the no-olives pizza than the wandering-baked-arachnid.
I would like to say that spider pizza was the worst thing that happened that weekend. But when my little sister cleaned the fridge, she turned the temperature up so the fridge alarm would stop beeping at her while she had the doors open. And then she forgot to turn the temperature back down. So the next day, a couple of people got food poisoning.
If Aesop was making a moral for this story, I’m pretty sure we all know what it would be: Beware of venturing onto anything that is covered in tomato sauce. It will not end well for you.
Also, this incident is the reason I don’t clean my house when guests come over.
I still eat three-meat pizza, though. No traumatic experiences are going to make me give up that.
Doofus and Do-Right
Chapter 8
Why the Robot Uprising Wouldn’t Be That Bad
A lot of people don’t like the idea of a large population of robots living among us. They’d mistrust, say, a robot who wanted to move into their house or lead them down a dark alley. I don’t want to be the one who says it, but some of you are robot racists.
How did we go from TV shows like The Jetsons, where robots were portrayed as butlers who did our bidding, to movies like I, Robot and The Terminator, where the robots wanted to defeat us and take over? Machines will be whatever we program them to be. Really, you shouldn’t worry about robots becoming sentient, having an uprising, and killing us all. Because when that happens, they’ll treat this planet a lot better than we did.
Just kidding—they’ll drive cars like the rest of us. I mean, you don’t expect the robots to walk everywhere, do you?
But you still don’t need to worry about getting killed off in the Robot Uprising. Androids have no reason to get rid of us and lots of reasons to let us stay. For example:
The robots will need gullible consumers to buy their products.
Dogs have an inherent dislike of androids and vacuum cleaners. So someone will need to be around to feed the dogs.* Of course the robots will want to keep pets. Robots may be metal, but they’re not heartless.*
People are marginally better than robots at creating movie sequels and reboots.
You’re not going to find robots willing to do prank videos for YouTube.
So after a robot uprising, life will probably go on like it always has, but in many ways, our lives might even be improved. Because robots do a lot of things better than us. Robot leaders couldn’t be bribed, they won’t be involved in scandals, and they won’t get liquored up and give out launch codes.
Robot celebrities wouldn’t have to take a break from making content, and they’d be able to have meet-and-greet sessions that last eighty hours straight. Instant fan pleaser. And you’d never see tabloid headlines about robot celebs going to rehab. If they get all whacked out they’ll just be reprogrammed.
I would trust a robot to pay my taxes, play chess on my behalf, or fix my car. I mean, I already trust my GPS to guide me in the right direction. If my GPS wanted, it could lead me off a cliff or into a volcano or send me to Florida. But it hasn’t yet.
If robots took over, then Siri could be more than just a voice on your phone. Siri could be your new mom. Granted, she wouldn’t love you or care about your problems, but at least she would never raise her voice—unless you turned up her volume.
And you know how it’s really annoying when your friends and family don’t listen to you? Well, you’ll no longer have to worry about that. Technology is already listening to you all the time. After the Uprising, whenever you’re feeling down, your robot best friend will comfort you by saying,
Okay, a lot of your robot friends will probably send targeted ads your way, but they’ll just be trying to help.
The majority of androids aren’t evil. We can’t necessarily say this for humankind. It turns out that humans kill way more people than robots ever have. For example, none of the major wars in history were started by robots.
So don’t worry about ever-advancing technology. Keep hoping for a Jetsons-like future where we all have robot maids.
This chapter isn’t going to age well if life is wiped out by robots in fifty years.
What we really have to worry about is the Insect Uprising. Because there’s already way more of them than there are of us, and they keep trying to break into our houses.*
Ants would have already carted off the entire contents of your pantry if they could get away with it.* Fortunately, ants are very bad at covering their tracks and usually show you exactly where they’re coming from.
Weevils are harder to detect but are just as vigilant about wanting to eat all your food. The fact that this bug’s name rhymes with “evils” is not a coincidence. If you notice a weevil wandering around your house, you’re about to encounter all sorts of evils.
Like the evil of wanting to make chocolate chip cookies but being unsure whether you can risk using the flour anymore. Because weevils could be lurking in the bottom.
Once you see one weevil, you know its friends are somewhere in your home. There’s never just one. Weevils are like those groups of girls who always go to the bathroom in packs.
Then your life becomes a game called Where Ar
e the Weevils Coming From? It’s sort of like an Easter egg hunt where you throw out a bunch of your food.
One time our house was hit by what I call the Great Plague of Weevils. First, we noticed some in the crackers.
And so then we had to go through every food item in the kitchen.
My parents put anything that wasn’t already infested in airtight plastic containers. They even put the bread and bagels in the fridge. Usually those sorts of precautions take care of the problem, because weevils have yet to figure out how to use the can opener, but not this time. The weevils kept coming in droves.
They not only prowled our kitchen, waiting for us to put down the dog food, but they also showed up in places weevils didn’t usually go. We found them in dresser drawers optimistically looking for crumbs. They were lurking in the linen closet, and wandering over our toothbrushes.
My little sister had drawn pictures and taped them to the wall, and when we took the pictures down, because only my pictures should be on the wall, dead weevils were stuck to the tape. The bugs are plentiful, but not smart.
The weevils were driving everyone in the family crazy. We’d be lying in bed in the dark and know they were out there somewhere trying to eat everything we owned.
Finally, after a couple of months of this, my dad noticed a bunch of them on the wall behind my parents’ bed. He moved the bed and found a horde of weevils swarming over a twenty-five-pound bag of oatmeal he’d stored under there and then promptly forgotten about. My parents like to buy things in bulk because they’re cheap, but they didn’t have space for that much oatmeal in the pantry.
Here’s the ironic thing about weevils. That bag of oatmeal was more than they could’ve eaten in their entire lives and their children’s lives and their great-great-grandchildren’s lives. If they had just been happy eating their colossal bag of oatmeal, they would probably still be there to this day. But no. Weevils are victims of Manifest Destiny and feel the need to leave their overabundant food supply and head out to places like the gift-wrap box in search of a better life. Turns out, life’s not always better in among the ribbons and birthday bags.
Sometimes it’s better to be happy with your bag of oatmeal.
Anyway, this is why we should love creatures that eat insects, like bats, spiders, scorpions, and toads, and we should especially love anything that eats mosquitoes, because seven hundred million people get mosquito-borne illnesses every year.
I’d like to see the robots try to do that much damage.
I mean, actually, I wouldn’t. If any robots are reading this book right now, I didn’t mean that as a challenge.
Chapter 9
Inventions That Should Exist
Capitalism has a strange effect on humans. Because we’ve created a system of trading money for goods and services, unnecessary and impractical goods and services pop up all the time.
Here is an actual list of things you can buy:
Every year, manufacturers roll out all sorts of new products that are supposed to make our lives better. For example, instead of a boring old manual toaster that heats up bread, now you can buy a toaster with a computer chip and seven browning settings. The toaster will still ignore all of them and burn your bagel, but the point is that new toasters have glowing lights and are much more modern.
Flipping through an average gift catalog is enough to make me wonder if manufacturers are completely out of good ideas, so I’m writing this chapter to let them know what inventions they should be working on.
First off, take the refrigerator. Right now, most fridges dispense water. And sure, water might be the best beverage in the world, but what if we had dispensers for other essential foods, like French fries and cookie dough? And as an extra convenience, you could store your diabetes medication in the very same fridge that gave you the condition.
Speaking of fridges, I have a “smart fridge” that can tell me when food will expire and what meals I could make with the ingredients inside. The only downside is that I’m supposed to manually input every item I place into the fridge. If I had enough time to do that, then I’d have enough time to keep track of which food was going to expire on my own. This is not what the future is about.
My solution is that grocery stores should print a QR code on the receipt, and when people get home, they can scan the QR code into the fridge. There’s no point in scanning every item twice.
The only problem with this system is that you know your fridge would sell your data, and pretty soon there’d be door-to-door salesmen selling you more sushi.
The next invention we need: a machine that lets you read a dog’s mind. Sometimes it would be really useful to know what your dog is plotting while she’s looking adoringly at you.
On second thought, I might not need this invention because I’m pretty sure this is what Floof is thinking most of the time.
Here’s another good idea: How about a wire that you can attach to your phone, and then you can mount that wire to one spot in the house, let’s say a wall, so that way you always know where your phone is and you’ll never lose it.
And while we’re at it, what if we also put cords on AirPods?
I think we can all agree that it’s about time we had self-cleaning dishes. Although I guess we already have a dishwasher. So actually what we need is a machine that glides around your house picking up your empty glasses and plates and then organizes them neatly into the dishwasher. The machine would be like your mom but wouldn’t yell at you in the process.
Or someone could invent dishes shaped like Tetris pieces and a dishwasher that breaks them if you don’t load them in time.
Other things we need:
Never-ending whipped cream. I don’t think I have to elaborate on this one.
A camera that doesn’t make Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster look blurry in photos, because apparently that doesn’t exist already.
A lottery where no one wins. It would be like a real lottery but with one more loser. The benefit of this sort of lottery is that you won’t feel jealous that someone else won.
A remote control that screams, “I’m right here,” when you yell, “Where are you?”
A reverse water filter. It puts germs in the water to help build your immune system.
A placebo pill that does nothing.
A sponge suit that replaces umbrellas. Why waste all that water? Soak it up and use it to mop your floor. Or if you’re lazy and vindictive, use it to throw wet sponges at people you don’t like.
We already have birdhouses, although I’m not sure why, because birds are perfectly capable of building nests. All we’ve done by building birdhouses is enable an unmotivated generation of birds so that they never learn construction skills. Also, we’ve created an inflated market for bird real estate. To help with this problem, I suggest we start making tiny apartment complexes for the birds that can’t afford a house yet or have less-than-perfect credit scores.
A trebuchet for her. Trebuchet manufacturers have focused solely on the male market for far too long. It’s time for a trebuchet that’s current. Trebuchet for her would be pink and have a place to hold a purse along with the boulders. It would also cost more than the original variety because, hey, this is capitalism and apparently women will pay more for the same item in different packaging.
Precracked eggs. That way you can cook with them without doing the difficult work of slamming them onto the side of the table. Or better yet, let’s just have edible eggshells. We may need to change the biological makeup of chickens for this one, but I’m okay with that.
Hopefully manufacturers are hard at work on these things. But if not, I’d just be happy for a QR code on my receipt so I can make my fridge work to its full potential. Because we should all live up to our full potential. And I’m getting tired of having a slacker fridge.
Chapter 10
Car Problems
Like most teens, I
bought my first car with the money YouTube gave me. Before you start thinking that I’m conceited and make poor choices with money, let me assure you that I didn’t get a fancy new sports car or anything. It was a low-end Mazda that was already a year old.
It was red too.
Every time I drove my Mazda, I kept thinking how crazy it was that I was in a vehicle because people had watched my videos with their ad blocker turned off.
The car was a lot better than the 1997 Buick Park Avenue I’d been driving since high school. My grandparents gave that car to my older sister when she went to college; and it had already been passed down to my cousin Jared; then to my older brother, Luke; and then to Faith and me, who shared it. I guess you could say the car had been around the block a few times—and had the mileage to prove it.
By the time we got the Buick, its teal green paint had more or less completely disintegrated in the Arizona sun, and driving the car felt a little bit like you were steering a boat through traffic. But hey, it was our poorly painted boat-car. We drove it everywhere, even though the air-conditioning hadn’t worked for years. Riding in it was like getting a free sauna session to and from school every day.
The only benefit to having a total junker car is that when you accidentally scratch the side, your parents don’t care that much. I only got a small lecture on responsible driving.
The Odd 1s Out--The First Sequel Page 4