The Twitter-Amazon Automatic Poop Bomber

I was working on a post earlier today describing our experience with Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant.  There were a few references in the post about Alexa’s capabilities, one of them being her ability to let me order stuff from Amazon using my voice instead of my computer.  In the near future, you’ll be able to order products from Amazon and have them delivered by drone within minutes.  

I was driving to work this morning and started thinking a little more about that capability.  It would be really cool to be sitting in your living room and tell Alexa to order something for you without even getting out of your chair.  Minutes later, a drone would show up to deliver your purchase.  Now that’s what I call putting technology to work.  I guess it could also be called the height of laziness, but that’s for another post so I’ll just save that thought for later.

I’m an IT guy so sometimes my mind tends to overthink things.  Well, my mind tends to overthink things a lot, even the little things that probably don’t deserve a lot of thought in the first place, but I can’t help it.  A lot of my best ideas were developed this way.  Unfortunately, some of my worst ideas were born  this way, too.

As I continued my grueling commute, I wondered if it would be possible to order something through Alexa and have a drone deliver it to someone else instead of to my address.  That would be cool.  I imagined being on the phone with my daughter two thousand miles away and hearing her say “I want to go camping this weekend, but I haven’t been able to find the time to go buy a tent.”  It would be great if after our call I could just have Alexa deliver a tent to her.  The conversation might go like this:

Me:  “Alexa, what is a good tent for two people?”

Alexa:   “The Super Alpine 994 XL is the highest rated tent on the market.”

Me:  “Alexa, order a Super Alpine 994 XL tent and deliver it to Kate right away.  Please include a nice card.”

Alexa:  “Order confirmed.”

About 15 minutes later Kate would hear something buzzing around outside her front door and when she opened the door she would find her new Super Alpine 994 XL highly-rated tent and a nice Hallmark card telling her who sent it.  That would be very cool.

Here comes the overthinking part.  I thought about how nice it would be if you could also send an entirely different kind of delivery to someone you didn’t like.  For example, if a co-worker was making your life a living hell all week, you could send them signed copy of “How Not to Be an Asshole at Work.”  Or if your neighbor refused to mow his lawn until it was 2 feet tall you could send him a video on lawn care.  Or if you saw a post by your ex on Facebook talking about how hard her diet was, you could order up a couple of pounds of chocolate and a case of chicken strips for her.

And then it got really bad.  I wondered if I could order a bag of manure and have it sent to someone.  My mind was racing by this point.  What if I could order up a bag of manure and have it delivered to Donald Trump?  I imagined a drone whizzing up the front porch of the White House and unceremoniously depositing a 50 pound bag of manure there.  With a nice Hallmark card of course.  It would be the ultimate expression of free speech.  When I arrived at work I took care of a few items and then got on Amazon.  Sure enough, you can buy a 40 pound bag of manure for $5.99.  Concerned that it might be too large to be delivered by drone, I searched around a little more and found a 5 pound bag of “dehydrated super manure” for a dollar more.  Only a dollar more and this was super manure instead of regular run-of-the-mill manure.  I briefly considered the problem of how to re-hydrate it once it reached the White House, but decided that that wouldn’t be necessary because just the act of sending some manure would make my point adequately enough.  Perfect.  The stage was set.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the possibilities were endless.  Every time Donald Trump tweeted something hateful, stupid, or self-promoting, I could just have Alexa send him another bag of manure.  I realized that this could get very expensive very quickly because he does that many times per day, but it would be the ultimate negative reinforcement for bad behavior.  Common sense and the concepts of kindness and empathy are foreign to him, so maybe this would work.

In reviewing my plan I realized that, in order to be used as negative reinforcement for bad behavior, it had to happen as soon as that behavior occurred.  If you’ve ever swatted your dog with a rolled up newspaper after he peed on your favorite rug, you know that you have to do it right away so he’ll associate the swat with his bad behavior.  If you don’t he won’t know why he’s being swatted and he’ll think you’re just some jackhole who enjoys beating dogs.  You don't want to be that guy.

The timing presented a problem.  Donald Trump either doesn’t sleep very much or he sets his alarm clock for random times during the night so he can get up and tweet a couple of mean things and maybe throw a little hate around before going back to bed.  Or maybe all of it just builds up in him while he’s asleep and the need to let it out wakes him up.  I don’t know, but he tweets all kinds of vile things in the wee hours.  I didn’t like the prospect of staying awake all night watching his Twitter feed just to send him bags of manure.  I’m an activist, but I’m not stupid. 

I am, however, an IT guy, so another idea was born.  I could write a computer program to watch his Twitter feed overnight and send him a fresh bag automatically every time he tweeted.  I began to devise an algorithm to watch each tweet for key words and trigger another manure delivery when it detected one.  Now you would think that this would be easy, but it really isn’t.  I’m a good programmer and making this thing work reliably could get pretty complicated.  Besides watching for key words, the program would need to scan my own email for the confirmations of each Amazon order, keep track of how many bags of manure were sent, and do some kind of checking to make sure it didn’t accidentally send Kate a bag of manure to go with her new tent. 

After a little more thought I decided that I didn’t really need to scan his tweets for key words because they are always hateful, stupid, and self-promoting.  I decided that keeping track of how many bags of manure were ordered overnight wouldn’t really be necessary.  I could just check my bank balance each morning and would know right away.  And I could tell Kate what I was doing and that, if she got a bag of manure by mistake, she could just let me know and I’d tell Amazon to send their drone over to pick it up.

And the Twitter-Amazon Auto Poop Bomber is born.  So now that I have a plan, we’ll see if it passes the sanity check when I tell Tanya about it after work.

(Note:  This is the first time in my life I've ever used "tweet" as a verb and I'm not proud of it at all.)