Our so-called ‘smart’ car’s incessant warnings are driving me nuts

I have a lovely husband. We’ve been together for a very long time; 50 years in November, to be precise. We are growing old together and, by and large, we jog along very well. Like all long-term couples, there are things about him which get on my nerves and things about me that get on his. But, as he’s very particular about how things get done and I am much more slapdash, we complement and irritate in equal measure.

One of his particularities, however, is the management of time. This means he sets an alarm on his phone whenever he makes an appointment or wants to remind himself of something.

May I just quietly repeat that? He sets an alarm on his phone!

The result of this is that our days are punctuated by his phone going off like a frog in a sock, quite often when he has gone off to do whatever it is he does with our cows in a distant paddock. This means I need to find his phone, find my glasses (so I hit STOP and not SNOOZE) and switch the bloody thing off, all while associating my husband’s name with some very rude words.

When I ask him later what the alarm was for, he can rarely recall, making the whole exercise annoyingly redundant. Alarms, after all, are not called that for nothing. His phone invariably makes me jump out of my skin.

I thought I had learnt to live with it but, as I explained in a previous column, that was before just about every electrical appliance and machine in our home, particularly the newer ones, began beeping at me aggressively at various times during the day and (groan) night. Honestly, my nerves are shattered.

In fact, all these machines carrying on at me to do something takes me back to when I was the mother of small children, constantly running from one to another trying to soothe, feed, change, clean up or save from certain death. I resent the machines more than I did my children, although I’m also forced to admit they are usually a lot easier to shut up. But now that I’m older, I thought I might get some respite. No such luck.

Out of the blue came the kind of dulcet tones you hear while waiting for someone (anyone) to answer a phone call to a business or institution.

Machines aren’t just beeping at us now; some of them, creepily, have started to talk. My husband’s car came back from the mechanic recently with a new steering wheel; the old one had begun to perish in the sun. All well and good, until we drove it for the first time. Out of the blue came the kind of dulcet tones you hear while waiting for someone (anyone) to answer a phone call to a business or institution.

“Caution,” said the female voice, “approaching high accident area.” Holy shit! The your-call-is-important-to-us lady was speaking to us from the steering column!

Just after we’d recovered from the surprise of discovering a disembodied back-seat driver in such an odd spot, we entered Sydney’s NorthConnex motorway tunnel. This is when we realised the soothingly voiced yet strangely anxiety-inducing ghost lady was as blind as a bat.

“Caution. Approaching school zone.” Wrong, we were in a tunnel. “Caution. Red light camera ahead.” Nope, no traffic lights in the tunnel. And, most bizarrely of all, “Caution. Railway crossing ahead.” I half expected to see a ghost train emerge from the tunnel wall, lights flashing, wheels spinning, bells ringing, noisily filling NorthConnex with steam. Clearly the your-call-is-important-to-us lady has got me spooked.

Apparently, we can turn her off but, get this, we have to do it before every drive! WTAF?! We are resigned to her spectral presence now and just ignore her completely, but it remains annoying that every time she speaks, our podcast or music is momentarily muted.

Some machines still beep, of course, but manufacturers have added diabolical wrist-slaps for us flawed humans who fail to comply. My stove beeps if anything boils over on its surface, and that’s annoying enough. But do you know what it does next? It turns itself off and refuses to turn itself back on until it’s good and ready. I am the first to acknowledge I am not the world’s greatest cook, but even I understand the importance of timing when it comes to preparing an edible meal.

We’re all understandably concerned about the advent of AI. I confess to having been relatively sanguine about it, rationalising that I was too old for it to bother me. Mea culpa! I want to sound the alarm. If the your-call-is-important-to-us lady is any guide, and she will insist on it, the future is going to be very horrible indeed.

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