Just follow me on this one…

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do quite a bit of traveling recently over the last few months – as I’ve been rubbing in the last couple of weeks, my wife and I went to Disneyland for our anniversary earlier this month, and before that we took the road trip of all road trips this summer that spanned some 4,500 miles and kept us away from home for the better part of August in its entirety.  Needless to say, 2010 has certainly been a very adventurous year for us both and aside from the occasional watered down margarita or inadequately fluffed hotel pillows, I can’t really complain much in the vacation department!

That said, if there’s one thing that friends and family and pretty much everyone else on the planet have definitely been quick to point out upon my various returns, it’s that apparently life still goes on even while I’m on vacation, whether I’m either sunning myself on the lush, exotic beaches of Northern Michigan or simply standing in line at a theme park in California to get my picture taken with a giant, talking mouse.  Despite my own personal lack of priorities and overall ambition to do much more than stumble down to the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet before 11am, everyone else not on my vacation still has to go to work, get stuck in traffic, and do all of those other horrendously inane things that people strive to go on vacation from in the first place…

Bummer, I know!

Of course, it’s not like I was without any obligations or responsibilities during this time primarily filled with gallivanting and general tomfoolery – there were still book orders to fill and bills to pay and fish to be fed, only two of which I found that I was actually able to do from a distance via the magic of the Internet.  Luckily for my beloved, behemoth-sized guppies, though, just before leaving I picked up a couple of these swell, mechanical feeders that promised to fulfill the role of sprinkling little specks of food into their tank on a daily basis while I was away.  And admittedly I was a wee bit nervous at the start of the first trip concerning whether or not they would actually work or if I would be coming home to become one relaxed, but nonetheless seriously depressed former fish owner!

Now I am happy to report that my fish most definitely survived my recreational hiatus without any significant starvation altercations. The automatic feeders worked great – I came home to find the fish swimming happily around their tank like they hadn’t even noticed that I was gone!  And granted, fish aren’t exactly what you might consider high maintenance – I mean, as long as somebody (or something) keeps their food in the tank and the filter keeps their poop out of the tank, that’s about it.  It’s not exactly rocket science, which just exacerbated how I felt a week later when I realized that even though I was home, I hadn’t actually gone back to feeding the fish myself.

I don’t want to make excuses, but I had things to do, a routine to get back into, a lot of old episodes on the Tivo to get caught up on … and of course, the entire period of my unintentional neglect, they didn’t notice a damn thing because as long as the magical, robot feeder who lived above the water kept tossing stuff in for them to eat every day, as long as I still cared enough to just make sure that the feeders themselves stayed full, I was golden!  Did it make me a bad pet owner to be relying on a battery-powered gadget to perform pretty much my only owner-ly duty for these creatures???  Absolutely – of course it did! Was it enough to make me change my lazy ways and actually go back to doing it myself?!

Well…

The thing is this – I think there’s something to be said for at least recognizing one’s own weaknesses because that’s really the only way that you can ever improve on them.  Now if it’s actually more efficient for me to just use a robot to do this particular task on schedule without fail, then wouldn’t it actually be irresponsible for me not to make use of the technology available to me, instead forcing them to rely on my own unpredictable memory for their very sustenance???

Besides, we already rely on automated machines for other important tasks around the house – everything from washing the dishes (dish washer!) to vacuuming the floor (Roomba!!) to entertaining the kids after school (Nintendo!!!) – so why not put even more robots to work doing the stuff that frankly, we don’t really even want to do anyways. In fact, now that I’m well past whatever “guilt” originally inspired this column, I’m already thinking ahead to the future of what other applications for robotic intervention may present themselves as our family grows!  You know, they say that pets are probably the best training that a couple can get before having an actual baby…

Wait – what’s that, honey?  We’re not feeding our baby like a hamster in a cage?!

Well, I was just explaining to my readers here how it just might be more efficient to…

But what if I forget to…

Ok, so maybe we’ll have to table this idea for now, at least from the perspective of human feeding, although just between you and me, I think it’d be a great idea to help make raising your newborn a bit easier – you have this little machine that just hangs over the side of the crib, regularly dispensing chicken nuggets or pizza rolls or whatever the heck it is that babies eat, and you don’t ever have to worry about accidentally forgetting to feed the baby because you went on a three week vacation or because there was a Seinfeld marathon on TV Land!

It’s all about efficiency, I tell you.  Lazy, albeit good-intentioned efficiency…