At 7am on a Sunday I’m not expecting much. But I am expecting to be asleep. This 7am in particular had other ideas. Or Alexa did. Her little notification tone chimed. It’s a gentle tone. It didn’t make me sit bolt upright. It just made me ask Rick what was going on while I slowly opened my eyes to the rhythmic pulsing of Alexa’s yellow glow.

I thought Alexa was having a meltdown. Or the wifi was. Or we’d lost power at some point and she just came back online.

So I asked her. “Alexa, why are you flashing?”

And she carefully explained to me that the flashing light meant I had a new message or notification. And that I could ask her to play that message or read that notification. 10am Cami would have already known that. 7am Cami isn’t sure where her nose is located.

So at 7am on a Sunday when I would rather be sound asleep I didn’t really want to hear that message. I wanted to be asleep.  Which means I wanted the yellow flashing to stop so I could pursue that elusive Sunday morning sleep-in.

So I asked her to play that message figuring it would cover things adequately.

“You have no messages. You have 1 notification. To hear notifications ask me to read notifications”

ARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

“Alexa please read notifications”

It’s important to be nice. The future robot overlords will have a record of how we treated these devises. And I don’t think they’ll care how early it was when we are rude.

Alexa began to read the notification. A shipping notification.

It’s the holidays after all and while I’ve already changed the setting to not  tell askers the name of any items shipped when asking for a status on orders, because secrets, I didn’t recall setting up notifications when items did ship. And certainly not directly to my bedroom dot unit. Or any dot unit. And certainly not at 7am on a Sunday. But apparently I had. And I had no idea what she might say. And I certainly didn’t want her to tell Rick about any specific items that might have shipped because, again, secrets.

“Alexa STOP” I cried hoping to keep the secrets with me, Alexa, and the robot overlords.

So a note to all of you: make sure you have your notification settings updated to your liking.

And a note to Amazon and our future robot overlords: please let us setup do not disturb hours.

Because no.  I didn’t get back to sleep…