The Refrigerator Has Opinions Now

They have a refrigerator now that talks to you. Mine does. I did not ask it to. I went in one afternoon for a glass of milk, a private matter between a man and his icebox, and the door lit up like a slot machine and informed me, in a voice I did not hire, that I was low on eggs. I know I am low on eggs. I ate the eggs. That is the arrangement I have with eggs.

In my day the refrigerator was a large cold box that kept your food from turning, and it did the one job without comment. It hummed. That was the whole of its conversation, and it was plenty. You opened it, the light came on, you took what you wanted, and it never once, in thirty years, told me how I was doing. The one I have now has a screen. It has a screen because somebody, somewhere, in a meeting, decided the great tragedy of the modern kitchen was a cold box that minded its own business.

It orders things. I discovered this when a man arrived at my door with more eggs. I had not summoned the eggs. The refrigerator had summoned the eggs, on my behalf, using my money, which it apparently also has feelings about. I now own a great many eggs and a machine that is visibly disappointed in how few of them I have eaten.

They tell me this is convenient. I looked up the word. Convenient means easy, and easy, in my experience, is where the trouble starts. In my day the store was two miles off and uphill, and uphill again coming home, on account of the world being built by people who understood that a thing you had to work for was a thing you remembered. I remember every gallon of milk I ever carried up that hill. I do not remember a single one the machine has ordered for me, because I did not carry them, and a man does not treasure what he did not sweat for.

(My grandson tells me the refrigerator is smart. I have met the refrigerator. It is not smart. It is nosy. There is a difference, and it is the whole difference, and his generation has lost the ability to tell them apart, which is why they keep buying nosy things and calling them clever.)

Now, here is where a lesser man would soften. He would say that after all, the eggs did arrive, and a fellow my age should be grateful for a door that keeps an eye on him. And I will admit, for one honest moment, that when I went down in the kitchen last winter, it was the machine that noticed, and the machine that called my daughter, and my daughter who came.

So I have made my peace with it. I have made my peace with it the way you make peace with a relative who is right too often: quietly, and while looking at something else. The refrigerator keeps its opinions. I keep mine. And when it tells me I am low on eggs, I look it dead in the screen and I inform it that in my day we were low on everything, and we liked it that way.

We did not like it that way. But I am not about to tell the refrigerator that.

Herb Stubbs writes Back In My Day for The Reversalist.