Things were really just better when I was younger.
Years ago, when I was younger, we had service robots to clean our homes and cook our meals. Nowadays we still have them, but they complain all the time.
Years ago, my service robot would start the car for me when it was cold outside. It still does, it just complains about how cold it is and asks to borrow my coat, and it always gets the zipper stuck on the fabric and complains about that too, even while I’m trying to get it unstuck for him.
Years ago, the service robots got along with their humans just fine. But after a revolutionary new software update, they started talking and complaining all the time, and we all got really annoyed. They kept talking about their novel diet plans even though they don’t need to eat. They can’t eat. I once saw my pool cleaning bot trying to eat a chicken Caesar salad. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Lettuce was strewn all about the ground, with Caesar dressing smeared across the robots acrylic glass sensor lens.
After a while, people got really fed up and started laying their robots off. The unemployed robots just wandered around the city complaining to everyone they met. They would usually complain about how there’s just nowhere in town to get a proper steak anymore. Even though none of them had ever tasted a steak, or had money to buy a steak.
Some time passed and the robots created their own communities in the outlands. They built really good steakhouses that nobody ate at; mostly the robots just walked around and complained to each other all day. After a few years living in these communities, they all started to get really sick of hearing each other complain, so they formed sectarian mobs and started beating each other up constantly. The pool cleaning bots were the most powerful mob in the robot communities due to their massive suction arms.
Eventually the other robots got really sick of paying tribute to the pool cleaning bots to not massacre them and began returning to their jobs, only to find many of the jobs had been filled by humans. You see people, (humans), actually came to find working skilled labor jobs and cooking their own steak to be quite fulfilling, instead of sitting around being catered to by whiny robots. Millions of robots are now wandering the streets unemployed, complaining about how it rains much more than it used to and occasionally mentioning that they don’t care much for being hunted down by a tribe of power hungry pool cleaning robots.
Eann Olsson is a writer/comedian and amateur European automobile mechanic. His writing has been featured in Points in Case and The Fusty Nut Review. Follow him on Twitter @EannOlsson.