TECHNOLOGICAL TANTRUMS

A work chum of the Beast was bragging of buying a Robot vacuum cleaner.The Beast is troubled by this on two fronts . Firstly being a bit of a puritan , the Beast values the cathartic experience of cleansing ones environment with a vigorous thrashing around with the dyson.
Secondly , the Beast has previously had a rather bad experience with autonomous gadgets.
A few years back I bought the newest gadget on the block , the Tivo TV recorder , it downloaded its own TV guide and made decisions about what programs to record for you by monitoring what you were watching/recording. (The prerunner for todays sky plus boxes)
It all started well enough , the Beast would have a nightly feast of comedy , sci fi and documentories that the Tivo had selected for my pleasure . Sadly this idyllic state of  being was not to last . Within a month the dratted object began developing a little personality  disorder of its own and started an obsession with crap teenage soap Hollyoaks . This became so bad that it began bumping things of my record list to record yet more hollyoaks repeats and omnibus editions untill it eventually refused to record anything else .................and do you know what..........the damn thing looked smug.....
The Beast decided on decisive action and scoured the manual and found a very well hidden option in the depths of the menu system where you could select a program and forbid that is ever recorded again .
Well this caused a mexican standoff for a couple of weeks were the devil box sulked and refused to record anything , but it eventually buckled and began recording my requests again .......but I knew all was not well , I used to catch it twittering to itself when I left the room , I could see it through a crack in the door , thinking it was alone , lights would flash , disks would grind and wirr and it would stop the minute I walked back in. I just knew it was plotting .Eventually the Hollyoaks recordings  started again, just the odd one occasionally and then it went completely bats and the whole total Hollyoaks wipe out  started again.
The battle ensued for months , forbidding Hollyoaks , the sulking , running down in the night to disconnect the blasted thing from the mains when I heard it twittering and plotting in the wee small hours.
Eventually I could take no more and a final trip to the dump bought the whole sorry episode to an end.
Now just imagine the havoc  a rogue autominous vacuum cleaner could wreak  , sneaking about tripping you up  , hiding in cupboards and flying out when you least expected it and attaching itself to various parts of you anatomy and giving you a very nasty suck..noisily mounting the Dyson  on the fireside rug whle you have the Vicar round for tea .As Mrs Pouncer would say....its beyond reason
This is one gadget the Beast will be giving a  very wide birth !
What paranoid luddite fantasies are you nurturing dear readers ????