English: My LCD clock with LED backlight. My o...Every so often you realize that you’re more or less living in the future, and that the future is pretty neat. In fact, most times it’s pretty great, except for two things:

a) In the future, everything is – for whatever reason – online
and
b) Some people are still assholes.

In fact, A wouldn’t even be a problem if it weren’t for B. But B has been a problem for all of history, and will likely continue to remain a problem until humanity dies out… probably due to some people being assholes. Most assholery, of course, remains to be the relatively low-level sort — creating annoyances rather than anything serious. The assholery-of-the-day is a series of viruses that make things act like fluffies. It could be much worse — different companies tend to make their products run on different proprietary OSes, so some items haven’t been hit yet, and unpopular ones likely will never be. You’ve updated the software patches promising better security as they come up and you’ve been pretty lucky.

Until today, anyway, when you were woken up this morning by your clock asking you “What time tiww weggies”. After a bit of babbling about when its “weggies” would come back and it could again give “huggies”, it briefly quieted itself…

“NUUUUUUUU!!! WYY DAWK!! WYY DAWK!!!”

The clock, having only recently decided it was a fluffy, didn’t realize that clocks typically not only have no legs nor eyes. In fact, they generally didn’t have voices until a few years ago when clocks that could announce holidays, temperatures and the like became a thing. You remember that clocks used to be able to do this back when they had radios in there, but whatever.

You walked out of your bedroom leaving your clock to cry quietly to itself, “huu-huu-huu”ing over its perceived loss of motion and sight. After a shower, you go into the kitchen and make some toast. You feel like some orange juice, so you open the refrigerator.

“NU WIKE COWD! NEED WAWM!”

And…. the temperature inside began to rise. You fight the dial and turn it back down and punch the side of the fridge.

“NUUUUUUUUU!! NU WAN SOWWY STICK!!”

You glance at the built-in screen in the door and see a tear-filled fluffy face.

“JUS WAN WAWM! NU WAN COWD!”

You tape the dial to the coldest setting the way you like, and hope that the fluffy’s traditional extreme weakness is something that’s also been built into the virus.

Looking at your watch — which is thankfully an old one which not only is not on the Internet, but doesn’t even use batteries in favor of a daily winding — you realize you’re late for work and run to your car.

“YAY GON’ GO PAWK!!”

Urrrgh. Luckily, while your car constantly babbles about going to the park, you can still steer and control it. When the car realizes you’re instead going on the freeway to work, it starts whining and calling you a “dummy hoomin”.

Your commute is about an hour to the office, and as you’re fighting a headache and trying to block out the whining, you see the clouds roll in, and it starts to rain.

Car drowns.

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