Our Lithping Robot

As briefly mentioned yestermorn, we have a lisping robot living in our kitchen.

More specifically, she is a robot, and she lisps. Cannot get the "s" sound right to save her mechanical life.

The home nurse people installed her and plugged her into our phone line. She sits on a countertop in a corner of the kitchen. She is wired to a square scale that sits on the floor. (Directly in front of my pots and pans cabinet, requiring me to keep my pots and pans in a large attractive BOX throughout the remaining tenure of the Lisping Robot. My housekeeping skills being poor to begin with, the pans-in-a-box look adds much to the scenery in our home.)

So every morning at 10 am, we, and several of our dogs, are catapulted into the air with shock when a LOUD VOICE in the kitchen suddenly yells out: GOOD MORNING! IT ITH TIME TO TAKE YOUR VITAL THYNTH! Oh, for a font option that would let me type those words in the size that the Lisping Robot speaks them at 10 am. You could read them from across the room.

So Bill hobbles out and steps on the scale, and finds out his weight. Then he is instructed to sit in a chair, during which time he applies medical gizmos to his arms, finger, mouth, etc. and finds out his oxygen levels, his heart beat speed, his temperature, and his blood pressure. Then Mademoiselle Robot asks him if he is especially tired today, if he wants his clinician to call, and a few other questions.

After all the information is in the possession of our Lisptress, she automatically dials the home health office and transmits the information to them, and they forward a copy to His Bladderious Curmudgeonry at Duke who, I suspect, uses his trash receptacle to forward this important information to the nearest landfill.

The thing is, she lisps.

What kind of casting agency would select a woman who lisps for the job of being the Voice of the Kitchen Robot?

Yet, there is something about a lisp that begins to endear itself. We have not only grown accustomed to her lisp, but we have come to strangely adore it.

"Playth the blood preth-er cuff on your arm and retht your arm ath inthructed by your clinician," she commands.

Oh, thay it again, PLEEEETH thay it again!

I suppose that the most important thing we have learned from our Robot is this: When you place two adults in a small house in the mountains and give them absolutely nothing to do but sit in a quasi-morose, mindbendingly boring silence, waiting for nothing more exciting than the next doctor appointment to transpire, said two adults will become so desperate for amusement that Lisping Robots will begin to seem compellingly fascinating, to such a degree that said Robots can even end up as the headline topic of an entire blog post.

Loving you from Robotworld,

Cowpuncher and Diamond Lil