Vexing Alexa

The Dad Diary
Edwin McGreal

It’s 3am and Frankie starts calling. Cursing her, I plod down to her room to see what the matter is.
She’s six-years-old now, so the days of her calling during the night are almost gone.
“Daddy, I had a bad dream,” she tells me. Not uncommon, so I go through the usual. Don’t ask what about, or it will perpetuate in her mind. Just reassure her that ‘dreams aren’t real, they’re only pretend’ and that the best way to forget about them is to go back to sleep.

Off I went and not a peep until the following morning, when she was the last of the three to wake.
By then, typically, she won’t even remember calling or the dream, but this time was different.

As she tucked into her breakfast, Frankie said ‘Daddy, can I tell you about my bad dream?’.
Of course she could.
“I had a dream that I broke Alexa because I asked her too many questions.”
There’s a fair bit to unwrap there.
For the uninitiated, Alexa is a virtual technology that can play music on your voice prompt and answer pretty much any question imaginable, except very profound stuff like ‘Alexa, why is Éamon being bold to me?’.
But Frankie and Éamon love asking Alexa to play their favourite songs, even if that means saying ‘Alexa, repeat!’ at the end of them, ad infinitum.

There are only so many times you want to hear N17 by the Saw Doctors or YMCA by the Village People!
They both absolutely love asking maths questions too. They are obsessed with Numberblocks on TV and then checking with Alexa to see if their own calculations are correct. They’re usually not too far off.
Anyone who knows Frankie will know that asking questions is her raison d’être in life. Myself and Aisling answer plenty, but she loves asking Alexa too, for variety. So thinking she had broken Alexa was like losing a friend!  But that wasn’t all. There was a sequel.
“And after I broke her, her eye popped out and started chasing after us!”
My daughter was nearly crying as she told me this but I couldn’t help starting to laugh, bad parent that I am. That made her worse so I had to reassure her that such a thing was the very definition of ‘pretend’ and couldn’t happen.
And to prove all was right in the world, I asked Alexa to play N17. Just the once, mind.

In his fortnightly column, Edwin McGreal charts the ups and downs of the biggest wake-up call of his life: parenthood.