Assault by batteries

The war with machines has been a common sci-fi staple for some time now; the notion that one day soon we’ll create artificial intelligence leading to our appliances turning on us with their logically superior but emotionally uncaring mechanised brains and obliterating the human race with shoulder-mounted pulse cannons in a synchronised outbreak of cold global carnage. And that.

But I’m convinced that it’s not artificial intelligence that we should be worrying about, but the bloody energy required to keep even the most basic of gadget going in the first place.

By which I mean batteries. Double ‘A’s. Pesky poison-filled cylinders of unfulfilled promise, that plague my home like rats, deeply and inexterminably entrenched at the heart of so much of my waking procrastination.
Partly I’m to blame for my impatience with the things. Alright, largely I’m to blame. It’s my own laziness that stops me just replacing the damn things in the TV remote when it starts showing signs of invisibility to the television. When even the simplest of commands starts requiring multiple presses of the buttons. Sometimes ridiculously slowly and deliberately like I’m training a house-pet, or trying to convey the word ‘pressing’ in a game of charades.

It’s my fault that I take so long to replace the batteries in the smoke alarm in the spare bedroom that the beeping noise it makes – to alert you to it’s impending inability to rouse you from a smoke-surrounded slumber – has manage to travel downwards through a half-octave by the time I get round to acknowledging its value in my happy home.

And I’ve probably failed to correctly install the software for the cordless mouse sitting beside me right now, which loses connection with the computer approximately once every three minutes. And not the fault of the batteries which I replace on a monthly basis. And – suspecting that they’re not actually the problem – leave sprawling on the other side of the keyboard, intending to stick them in the errant telly remote when it next plays up, just to squeeze those remaining last drops of power out of them.

It’s laziness, I know. But at least none of my robots will have sufficient energy in their pulse cannons to wipe me out.