There’s a new technology out and it’s not the Iphone. It’s a refrigerator that will order your groceries for you.
Okay, I’m not afraid to tell you that I’m a bit skeptical here. How does it know what you’re using up? I’m betting you have to tell it.
That’s all well and good, if you like the extra work it’ll no doubt bring, but what it should be doing is scanning you to see what exactly you’re eating. I mean, I have a teenaged boy. And he has friends. I rarely have enough milk in the house and sugary cereals are an endangered species here. And I know my son. He’ll be opening this new fridge door and saying to it, "I’m taking a carrot now. We have only three left."
Meanwhile, he’s helping himself to the last half of pie. I’d be inundated with carrots before the week’s out, if this fridge believes my son and calls in an order of carrots to the local Co-op.
Now, what the refrigerator should do is scan the kid. It should use one of those beams we see on Star Trek and yell out in a loud voice, or better still, announce it on an in-house PA, "You are not taking a carrot. You are eating all the pie. Back away from the refrigerator. I say again, back away from the refrigerator."
Or wave its arms around yelling, "Danger, Will Robinson, danger! All the pie is being eaten! Danger! Danger!" Then grab the offending teenaged boy (because it’s not necessarily going to be my own,) and hold on until an adult can come to pry the pie out of his hands.
You know, this could work for dieters, too. You simply program into the fridge what you should eat and it simply won’t let you reach for pie, but rather grab you with those flex hose pipe arms and not let go. Why, you could work up a nice cardio routine fighting it off, and speed and agility too, trying to get the pie out of the fridge before it grabbed you.
Of course, your teenaged boy and his friends would consider the whole food grab a challenge. They do, after all, have a computer game experience. Or they could just reprogram the fridge.
You’d catch on pretty quickly though, when you opened the fridge for supper’s nutritious salad and it said something cheeky to you like, "Enter password within five seconds or this refrigerator will self-destruct."
Oh, yes, self-replenishing refrigerators are fine, but those scientists should be working on getting teenagers to eat three meals a day, all nutritious, with no snacking. Now, that’s technology worth buying.
Have a nutritious day!
