It all started with Gracie (my wife of nearly forty years) wanting to give Rodney time off for the holiday season and it ended with me in an absolutely impossible situation. I'll tell you about it if you don't mind because I've got to tell somebody. Naturally, I'm changing names and details for our own protection.
It was just a couple of months ago, mid-December, and Gracie said to me, "Why don't we give Rodney time off for the holiday season? Why shouldn't he celebrate Christmas, too?"
I remember I had my optics unfocused at the time (there's a certain amount of relief in letting things go hazy when you want to rest or just listen to music) but I focused them quickly to see if Gracie were smiling or had a twinkle in her eye. Not that she has much of a sense of humor, you understand.
She wasn't smiling. No twinkle. I said, "Why on Earth should we give him time off?"
"Why not?"
"Do you want to give the freezer a vacation, the sterilizer, the holoviewer? Shall we just turn off the power supply?"
"Come, Howard," she said. "Rodney isn't a freezer or a sterilizer. He's a person."
"He's not a person. He's a robot. He wouldn't want vacation."
"How do you know? And he's a person. He deserves a chance to rest and just revel in the holiday atmosphere."
I wasn't going to argue that "person" thing with her. I know you've all read those polls which show that women are three times as likely to resent and fear robots as men are. Perhaps that's because robots tend to do what was once called, in the bad old days, "women's work" and women fear being made useless, though I should think they'd be delighted. In any case, Gracie is delighted and she simply adores Rodney. (That's her word for it. Every other day she says, "I just adore Rodney.")
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An outdated household robot is humiliated by a newer model ... an unanticipated twist of the infallible three laws of robotics.
