#i didnt really like how the original turned out . i wasnt doing great brain wise when i did it either but i liked the concept of it

[cheaploafs]

they were roommates…

[relativelyanonymousgirl]

My blog

It’s time for some changes around here. Well, not actually around here, you’re probably not gonna notice anything. As usual, the work has to be done inside my brain regarding this blog. And I’m taking you along for the ride. ‘

So I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks and this is why. When I started my blog I was in the positive part of the sinus wave that is my life. I was feeling good. I was feeling inspired. I was feeling motivated. And although I still had a lot of drama in my head surrounding my blog, it was a lot less drama then during the negative parts of my sinus ways or even just the parts where the derivative is negative. You can ignore that. 

Furtermore, this blog is dedicated to things that I know and have learned about the mental health journey and when you’re in one of those bad periods you’re not learning much and your brain isnt really enjoying thinking about it when you do. So coupled with some fear of failure issues regarding the act of blogging itself. Well I wasnt blogging. 

Now I could give you a lot os reasonable excuses and you’d probably believe them like I would. Examples are the ones I gave above but the thing is. The only thing I need to blog is a laptop and an idea. And even though I am in a bad period and I’m learning less, I’m still learning. I’ve got about one of those realisations per day so technically I could write a blog post per day. 

So I tried. I was grinding, work hard play hard and all that shit. It didnt work well. I wrote that post about the ‘messy middle’ and although I am happy i did that and that was all I could manage at that point it’s not really the content that I made this blog for. Now this is a no-rules blog (to battle my fear of failure) so its allowed to be there and all that, but it’s not my intention to write those type of posts. 

This is what I believe. Everywhere you feel resistance in your mind, there is a problem that you can solve by working on your brain. It’s a problem you cant (okay probs you can but its gonna take you soo much more energy and pain, not worth it) solve by simply grinding. I was feeling resistance in my mind about blogging and I tried to solve it by grinding, it didnt work and felt really wrong as well. Like writing that one blog post did not feel great.

It comes down to what I wrote in my last post. You have a subconcious, negative belief (unknown at this point), but you notice the symptoms, which often means experiencing resistance (you don’t feel like writing for your blog) then your brain offers The Excuse or The Excuses (writing a blog is not easy, I haven’t had any good realisations in a while, my brain isn’t tuned to realisations bc I feel bad and also dude, I feel bad, leave me alone). They’re probably all true and theorethically all valid reasons. But they’re not your reason. Your reason is the subconcious negative belief you have about yourself and writing this blog. 

So I have been having some subconcious negative belief(s) about my blog. For me, these usually have to do with fear of failure, which apperently has been with me for my whole life unlike my other mental health.. issues. So I’m scared that the posts that I wrote wouldn’t be as good as the posts that I wrote when I felt good. And when I felt good I had the right mindset about blogging, which for me is that at this point I’m just blogging to find my voice and after that learn how to write a good blog and just see what issues come up and battle. 

I feel resistance around having a public blog and I’m trying to expand my comfort zone (I’ll write about expanding your comfort zone vs stepping out of it later) by taking the biggest step in the right direction that still feels comfortable (also a superimportant concept, I think I wrote about this already some time ago). Which is writing a private blog. 

So I actually started writing and I was amazed at how good the stuff that I was writing was. Like not form-wise, I’m just rambling, but content-wise. And that’s where the perfectionism/fear of failure kicked in. 

One technique that I use to feel my resistance and imagine the size of the resistance is to compare the acitivty that I have a hard time doing to a similar acitivty that I find very easy. In my previous blog post I compared learning about computers, which I was unable to do, with learning about psychology, which I’m very good at. In this post it is writing for my blog, which I haven’t done in two weeks, compared to writing in my journal. I almost completely fill up an entire notebook per month. 

This technique is helpful because you can’t trust your brain. It believed The Excuse and even after you realise that that belief isn’t entire gone. If it was you could just start doing the activity that you felt resistance for. You cant, the resistance is still lingering and so is a little of your negative belief. For me, right now, this means that I know I’m not writing because of the negative belief but I think that if I’ve worked away the negative belief i would feel comfortable writing like three posts in a week maybe. Even though i could write on my blog equally much as in my journal which is at least one time a day. (when i wrote that i would feel comfortable writing three posts in a week I already got that little sliver of fear from my mind that goes ‘no you cant! I dont want to think about this! your posts won’t be good enough!).

Okay so I now know a. I have a problem b. my Excuse and c. the size of the resistance (which means i know what to work towards).

So let’s get to the juicy stuff. The negative subconscious thought. Okay I’m drawing up a blank. That’s okay, it happens. you gotta work with what you got. If you can’t turn the negative belief into words and it’s not entirely necessary, then just dont. The reason I know it’s not entirely necessary is because I’ve already got the solution in my head (it’s still a bit vague but I’ll work it out more). In fact I’m already exercising the solution, which you might have noticed by the fact that this is the second post I am writing today.  

You might be reading my blog (right, all those 0 followers am i right) and you’re trying to employ the little techniques and stuff that I tell you and you draw up a blank. That’s okay, it happens to me ALLL the time. I know what the next step is, but I cant figure it out. For example, I might feel some resistance and know something is ‘off’, but I don’t know exactly what feels off, I dont know my negative subconcious belief or my Excuse and I’m just not getting anywhere. In this case I know enough about my negative belief that I can work futher (it’s about fear of failure/perfectionism and has to with that I want my posts to be perfect or at least good enough or at least as good as the previous ones. I am viewing my blog as an end-result (good posts!) and means of validation (see, I am smart) instead of as a means (I am learning how to blog, mistakes are part of the process).

But sometimes you don’t. And that can be frustrating. Now the thing is, the brain is so immensely powerful, especially the subconcious part. So just let that part figure it out (I do this all the time, a genuine life hack). Now how do you do that? You already did. Your subconcious brain can only work on thoughts that you’re not trying to run away from AND that you are concious of. So the moment you realised there was some resistance and there was something off and you wanted to know what, this thought was added to your knowledge base and your subconious can start working on it. 

How does that work? not so sure, but it probably has something to do with sleep (where you solidify memories and somehow make connections between the new concepts you’ve learned and all the old ones) and just your brain associating at other times. Let me explain that last part. Imagine your thought is x and the solution is y. Now what you’ll want to do is think about x really really hard and try to come up with solutions (maye its z or maybe its p, or q or b) and it won’t work. Instead, you just allow it into your knowledge base and while you go about your day and you encounter new concepts (e, r, a, z, etc) your brain is making associations on its own. At some point you encounter y (the solution remember), Now your brain will associate it with x. tadaa! solution. But if x hadn’t been in your knowledge base, your brain would never have connected the two. 

Right let’s get back to the original post. I was talking about The negative subconscious belief and then made a detour to explain why it is okay if you can’t figure that one out exactly or at all. In this case its a “can’t turn it into words, but I know enough to work (at least partly) on the solution”. And the Negative belief is about perfectionism, as I also explained above. Now the solution for me is to start viewing my blog as I view my journal. The way I view my journal is that it’s not about what I write or the quality of what I am writing. That is not important at all, it’s about what the writing does to me, which is it helps clarify my thoughts. Now it’s a little different with my blog. Whereas I do not have an end-goal with my journal, I do have an end-goal with my blog, because I would like to end up with good quality posts. However, the way to get there is not to try to write good-quality posts at this point. 

So I used to think that the most important hurdles of writing my blog would be a. my perfectionism and b. my ability to explain the concepts in a way that it constitues good blog posts. But also I didn’t know shit about writing blogs, since I was an absolute beginner. That’s how it’s supposed to be and it means that you’re gonna encounter hurdles that you couldn’t imagine before you started writing. Obviously. Now although my fear of failure/perfectionism is probably #nr 1, I am battling that by changing the way I view my blog. And here is the new ‘hurdle’ that I’ve discovered: i can’t write posts where I explain the concepts I come up with eloquently, because I dont think about my concepts eloquently either. i dont have some kind of organised mind palace up there. It’s more like an abandoned dungeon and I only got this crappy flashlight that turns off halt of the time and sometimes I glimpe a concept and I try to hold on to it with all my might. But I don’t know much about it and I also don’t know how it connects with the other concepts in my head. It’s a bit of a jumbled mess.

I’d like to create some order in that chaos. One way to do this is by writing about the concepts. First off, you’ll learn more about the concept itself as you write, secondly it’ll start to make more sense since you’re ordering your thoughts and thirdly, which at this point I’m most interested in, you’ll make connections with the other concepts in your mind. For example, this blog post was just supposed to be about how i’m gonna change my brain to write more, but half of it is dedicated on how to let your subconcsious (yes I still cant write that word, fuck off) work for you. That certainly doesn’t make for a quality blog post but it does make for more order in my head. 

So let’s summarize: at this point in time these are the three main hurdles I have in getting towards my end-goal, which is writing good quality posts. The hurdles are #1 perfectionism, #2 eloquent writing, #3 having order in my mind about the concepts I write about. Now the eloquent writing will solve itself by me writing a lot. Writing is a skill and I’m practicing it. (it’s not that easy, there’s brain-changing involved here too, maybe I’ll write a blog post about that too someday). The perfectionism is ‘solved’ by changing the way I view my blog-posts: not as end-products but as a means to... create order in my mind about the concepts I write about, which is how I’m working on hurdle #3. 

There you go. A little insight in how I’m learning how to blog. And basically how I think too. I need to go eat breakfast now or I’d try to summarize the whole post a little more. Maybe in my next post. See ya. 

[viralhottopics]

My Life as a Robot

I have been part robot since May. Instead of legs, I move on gyroscopically stabilized wheels. Instead of a face, I have an iPad screen. Instead of eyes, a camera with no peripheral vision. Instead of a mouth, a speaker whose volume I can’t even gauge with my own ears. And instead of ears, a tinny microphone that crackles and hisses withevery high note.

Im a remote worker; while most of WIRED is in San Francisco, I live in Boston. We IM. We talk on the phone. We tweet at each other, but I am often left out of crucial face-to-face meetings, spontaneous brainstorm sessions, gossip in the kitchen.

So my boss found a solution: a telepresence robot from Double Robotics, which would be my physical embodiment at headquarters, extending myself through technology. Specifically, an iPad on a stick on a Segway-like base. The telepresence robot market is crowded, ranging from high-end offerings like iRobot’s Ava (starting price: $69K) to the relatively more affordable Double, which starts at $2,499. The company says it has sold nearly 5,000 of them since its launch in 2012. Mostly these go to big corporations like IBM and McDonald’s, but I’ve heard of teachers and hospitals using them, too. Supposedly all a Double needs to work is a strong Wi-Fi signal.

Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

The first time I opened the Double interface in Chrome and clicked on an icon of my robot 3,000 miles away I was greeted by the pixelated image of my boss’s torso and a few headless coworkers. There probably were some instructions somewhere that I should have read, but I didn’t. “How do I move it?” I asked them. “We don’t know,” they said. I clicked around. Nothing. I tried the arrow keys and, boom, jolted out of the robot’s charging dock and toward onlookers. I was like a foal, learning to walk. It took about 10 minutes to discover that a) driving a robot using a browser interface is clunky and b) the hip flooring choices of WIRED’s office were going to be my nemesis, with every transition from concrete to rubber to carpet providing another opportunity to fall on my screen.

Growing Pains

Before I ever tried the robot, I was sure I would hate the thing.I thought it would make me small and flat and foolish. I thought it would be annoying to deal with, would require me to wear pants (something we remote workers often don’t do, world!). I thought it would make me a novelty, a sideshow, a joke. And I thought it would be a waste of time.

Diary Entry: Day 1 Nice to meet you…robot, is it? says a strange torso I encounter in the kitchen.

EmBot, I say, Nice to meet you, too!

The figure leans down and puts a hand out to shake. Helpless, I move the EmBot from side to side using the arrow keys in what I hope translates as a gesture of excitement, rather than malfunction. Ill never really know if it worked out. The screen freezes and when it comes back, the torso is gone. I am alone, standing in a stream of humans trying to get breakfast.

Its just me, a robot, waiting in line for the human food I cant eat, I say. No response. I repeat it a few times. Is this thing on?

When I boot up, some of my original fears are realized: I’m disoriented and silly and helpless. I am a spectacle. People ogle and take pictures. I feel like a dog, the recipient of gawking smiles that say, Awwww, youre so adorably unable to take care of yourself. But, most importantly, I am surprised to find that being a robot is delightful. It’s thrilling. I am in the office! There is the kitchen! There is Sam! Hi, everyone! I am here!

Diary Entry: Day 2 I roll over behind Sams desk for a brief chat about a deadline. She hasnt heard me approach. I dont know what to do. If I just say her name shell freak out. I Hipchat her, Look behind you. As soon as I do it, I realize thats creepy—but its too late. She turns and there I am.

Hi, I say as casually as possible, I just–

Sam cuts me off. Em, she says, can you control the volume? Youre very loud.

I am? I ask.

YES, the entire bullpen yells.

I find and adjust the volume. I guess I was screaming all day.

Later that morning, I experienced the joy of being in the daily editorial meeting as a robot. Plunked at the end of the conference table, my iPad head tracked the conversation, listening. Yes, I interrupted people because my browser was a few seconds behind. Didn’t matter. I heard Molly on the phone from the Caribbean and she was barely audible. The audio system sucks. As she was trying to talk people were kind of looking exasperated. Not at her, but at the system. That was me two days ago, I kept thinking. Two days ago that speaker system was my only conduit to theentire company.

It was then I knew I could never go back. I felt so superior as my robot. I loved my robot.

I Am Become EmBot

The crazy thing about being a human 3,000 miles away from your telepresence robot is that divide instantly dissolves when you activate. As soon as I call into EmBot, I am her, and she is me. My head is her iPad. When she fell, I felt disoriented in Boston. When a piece of her came off in the impact, I felt broken.

Nothing drove home the depth of my connection more than the first time someone touched my robotic body without asking. My coworker (who shall remain nameless) came up to gawk at me, and then moved behind my screen. As I was chatting with other people, he picked me up and shook me. I expected pranks like this. Id have done the same thing if I were in the office and it were some other poor schmuck calling in to a stupid robot from far away. But I didnt expect how instantly violated I felt. He just picked up an extension of my body. One moment I was in control of myself, the next, I was powerless. I laughed from the iPad screen faced away from him, but I was unsettled, and then immediately embarrassed, for the first time, because why should it matter to me if the stick Im currently streaming from is picked up off the floor a continent away?

Get over it, I told myself. But then it happened again. And again.

Diary Entry, Day 3 My coworker picks me up as Im wheeling to the meeting because Im slow. I don’t want to be slow! I want to walk on my own! Im an adult! She lifts me up before I have a chance to object. In the air I meekly say, Just ask me first if youre going to lift me, which no one responds to because I assume they think that it’s a joke.

This became my secret shame. People wanted to help me, but every single time they did it, I felt infantilized. I needed to tell my coworkers not to pick me up—a conversation I dreaded. I did this by sending them a draft of my daily robot diary, in which they read about how I was feeling. (Classic passive aggressive move, you say? No doubt, but the few times I’d said the words aloud, they hadn’t clicked for people, so I thought the log was the best way.) It worked. Now no one touches my robot without permission. Case in point:

Diary Entry: Day 5 I cant get out of the all-glass conference room alone. I turn my screen to Joe and he says, Should I carry you?

Thats probably wise.

Ill just drop you off where its straight and then you can make your way from there. Joe is basically my robots father, and my robot is a toddler. When he picks me up Im jostled. He gently places me down at the straight hallway and I want very badly to navigate quickly back to my dock to prove Im self-sufficient, but the screen freezes twice and the motor is slow and it takes me forever.

Later, on the phone, another editor off-handedly said, You know, when Joe lifted you up and carried you—now I hope this doesnt make you uncomfortable—but from our end, with your face on the screen, it looked really inappropriate. Like he was cradling you in his arms. Because when we see the face, our brains cant help but project the rest of you, and so it was like you were actually being carried.

Looking at the future. #embot #newnewwiredoffice

A photo posted by @joemfbrown on May 7, 2015 at 11:00am PDT

So, even though I had given Joe permission to lift EmBot up, the fact that my face was still on the screen made other people uncomfortable. Fine. Another rule: If I ask for help and you pick me up, I’ll disconnect so the screen is dark. Voila. Everything was going to be fine.

EmBot Grows Up

After I put a stop to the inappropriate robot-touching, things quickly went from good to great. I’d call this the euphoria stage. I mastered the arrow keys (rather than holding them down and over correcting, just hit them quickly one at a time and roll like a BOSS). I figured out how to makethe robot stand taller so I wasnt constantly having conversations with peoples crotches. I booted up in the middle of spontaneous brainstorm sessions and shared ideas.

Diary Entry: Day 6

Major breakthrough! I have my first West-Wing-style walk and talk as Embot. I knew this day would come. After the morning meeting, Patrick walks with me down the hallway discussing a longread Im editing. Hes so cool about the robot thing that I briefly forget completely that its not normal to be a disembodied metal moving machine with an iPad for a face. He only says one thing that would be weird if I was walking down the hall as a fully-fleshed human, Youre about to run into wall, come this way.

At this point, I was also the star of cocktail parties in Boston. Everyone wanted to know how it was going with the robot. Are people still laughing at you? No. Isnt it weird that your robot is naked? No. Whats the worst thing thats happened with the robot so far? When I hit a dead-zone and EmBot died behind a strangers desk, with my face frozen on the screen, and I found out later that they thought I was lurking and spying on them. I mean, thats also one of the funnier things thats ever happened, but pretty terrible for that poor creeped-out human.

And just like that, I was a part of work in a way Id struggled to be since I first came on at WIRED. As a typical oldest child, tyrant and benefactor to two younger brothers, I pride myself on making sure everyone feels like were all in this together—whether “this” is divorce or publishing a magazine. Its hard to be that kind of leader when youre isolated from your team completely. When youre a voice coming out of speaker. EmBot changed that completely. Suddenly, there I was, materialized. My reporters and I started meeting face to face to discuss deadlines. Everything was so jovial and natural.

Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

The other incredibly wonderful thing at this stage was that though Embot put me physically in the office, because she was just my head and not my body no one at work was seeing how pregnant I was looking. Now, of course, they know I am pregnant, but since I am not there, the visual reminder of my changed condition was not in their faces. I have worked at places before where women start getting treated differently when their bellies show. The kid gloves come on. I had been dreading how this could play out, but the way EmBot works I remained present and yet unchanged. No one remarked on my belly. It was not a factor in my work.

I became obsessed with EmBot. I couldt stop thinking about her when I turned her off at night. How sad that this thing that has made my life so much better was just dead when Im done working.

Diary Entry: Day 8

Its Friday. It occurs to me that EmBot doesnt get to enjoy the weekend. If only she had arms, she could push the button, summon the elevator, and be free. But shes a prisoner at work. Whereas my physical body is having adventures, growing a human life inside it and moving into a new apartment AND dog-sitting a Bernese Mountain dog.

Mostly my weekend will be about trying not poison my unborn child with paint fumes. My physical body is such a liability. Embot, though she is shackled to work and unable to exist without me to inhabit her, in some ways has the much simpler side of existence.

What if I have to share the Embot with someone? I tell myself that would be fine, but I know already that I would be feel upset. Embot is a part of me. Anyone else would be an intruder.

You can see from the daily diary entry that it was right about now that my connection with EmBot got a little weird. I couldnt let go of this notion that Embot was me and yet she lacked all freedom to exist outside the office. I started to feel that she was a caged animal. Which made me feel like a caged animal.

EmBot needed her freedom.

Get her a Mi-Fi, my friends suggested. Suddenly I imagined this vast conspiracy—finagling a coworker in SF to get me a company MiFi and surreptitiously hiding it under her screen. But then what? EmBot would rush out into the big bad streets of SOMA and try to find other robots to play with, meanwhile my poor comrade would be grilled by the Conde Nast HR department wanting to know “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ROBOT? Who pushed the button to call the elevator, huh? The robot has no hands!”

That was clearly a terrible idea … and yet. I fantasized. I drove her past the elevator banks a few times to see if the Wi-Fi was strong enough for her to sneak out the door. I dont know what my plan was. EmBot was becoming a teenager. A teenager pushing her boundaries, pushing her luck.

First Pangs of Mortality

A photo posted by Patrick Witty (@patrickwitty) on May 7, 2015 at 12:09pm PDT

Within a few days, I started to realize perhaps EmBot wasn’t invincible after all. For one thing, I couldnt hear meetings very well. Sometimes I had to put my ear directly to the computer speaker to hear the people at the far end of the conference table, which meant that in the room EmBots face was just the folds of my (hopefully not-waxy) ear canal.

Double offers a $99 audio kit, which maybe would help this, but since we hadn’t yet decided if the robot was a wise investment, it was too early to shell out for add-ons.

Worse, though all EmBot needs to live is power and and Wi-Fi, signal strength was proving to be a big problem. Double Robotics acknowledges this is the leadingissue among corporate customers, because most businesses don’t prioritize a strong signal in hallways. This doesn’t matter for humans, but these dead zones can make navigating an office impossible for robots.

So even as I was obsessing about freeing EmBot from the cage of WIREDs office, she seemed less and less reliable. Even when the Wi-Fi was strong, the video would freeze for no reason. I missed crucial information in meetings, only to later learn that everyone thought I was listening because EmBot had frozen with my face on the screen, trapped in a ridiculous expression of curiosity.

And then, this happened:

Diary Entry: Day 12 I am feeling so alone. Embot is in a coma. She didnt charge overnight. “Haha,” I played it cool over IM to Davey, who sits next to Embot and checked on her vital signs for me. She shoved Embot into her dock. I assume shes charging now, but I cant tell.

Diary Entry: Day 13

She remains cut off of me. Its like Embot is in the kind of coma where she cant move or speak or alert the doctors that she is alive but inside her head, she is screaming, LET ME OUT! IM HERE! DONT TURN ME OFF!

Ive called her doctors, or parents, or gods, DoubleRobotics, but theres no answer. Theyll get back to me in one business day.

If she ever wakes up again, I promise to give her a better life. To give her some freedom.

Diary Entry, Day 14

Embot just had a seizure. I was so happy when she woke up that I decided this was my big chance to sneak her out and onto the elevator. I eased her out of the dock and turned to the right, but immediately something was wrong: her head was shaking. Just a little a bit at first but then side to side violently, thrashing around, my field of vision swinging wildly, too fast to make out peoples faces. I tried turning her and found that she was still responding to me somewhat but she could not be still. She was like diabetic Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias, shaking out her beautiful wedding hair in Truveys salon.

I heard Chuck say, Oh no, youve woken EmBot like she was some kind of monster.

What is happening? Davey cried from her desk.

EmBot is having a seizure! I screamed into the computer. I dont know what to do!

As Embots camera panned quickly in front of Davey I saw her get up.

Can you put her in her dock? I asked, breathless.

She wont stop moving. She just keeps shaking.

I turned her off on my end, but Davey reported that she was still seizing on her own, face blank. She was like the body of a chicken, walking bloody around the yard after the chef cuts its head off. I implored Davey to find a button to turn her off. She did. She docked her. Shes docked now.

My heart wont stop beating. Maybe EmBot is corrupted and corroded and my time with her is over. Maybe EmBot is a monster. I feel like I just a had a seizure.

@EmilyDreyfuss FYI, Embots going crazy. Wandered out of its dock, now manically rolling back and forth.

Alex Davies (@adavies47) May 19, 2015

Were working on a fix. A coworker in San Francisco is logging into her, which normally would upset me, but Im so nervous I don’t care that another being enters her.

Im on the phone with Double Robotics, relaying what he finds.

He reports: On the screen it was shimmying back and forth, and I looked across the room and it looked like a wandering confused and dizzy child aimless and afraid. and alone. I left my screen and went over to see if I could help. I picked it up and smelled the wheels to see if it was on fire or anything then hurried back to my screen to put it in PARK. I may cover it in a sheet.

The Reckoning

Teaching my robot the hard lesson that she is not free http://pic.twitter.com/wen8MONbBm

— emily dreyfuss (@EmilyDreyfuss) May 21, 2015

After EmBot terrorized the office, nothing was the same. I relinquished my delusions of granduer. Double Robotics sent a new unit, and immediately upon activating it I knew it was not really EmBot. It rolls differently. Its speakers are quieter. It doesn’t connect to the Wi-Fi as well. It teeters differently on the carpet-edge. It’s not me. It’s just a robot. A robot I can’t trust.

I still use it, of course. Sure, It’s incredibly glitchy. Most weeks I have to write in our group chatroom, “SOS: EmBot is stranded somewhere between the dock and the IT department. Can someone rescue it?” It went through a phase where I couldn’t hear anything being said in meetings. Then for four days it was paralyzed, so needed to be picked up and carried everywhere. Now it does this thing where it clicks and hisses when the Wi-Fi connection struggles, setting an off-tempo jazz rhythm to every meeting.

It’s fine. I still prefer it to the speakerphone. It brings everyone in the office joy, even when it struggles. I get laughed at a lot from the iPad camera, but I like it. In a lot of ways, EmBot is a joke we are all in on together. Could we just set up an iPad in the conference room with FaceTime or Skype and achieve essentially the same thing? Sure. But where would be the fun in that, people? Where would be the soul-searching? Human life is short, and being a part-time, part-useful robot makes it ever so slightly more interesting.

Diary: Who Knows What Day, I’ve Lost Count

Joe carried EmBot to the head of the conference table for the edit meeting, because her Bluetooth connection isn’t working properly so I can’t control it. Sam asked, somewhere off-screen where I couldn’t see her, “Em, did you get new glasses?”

“No,” I spoke to the rest of the room, “my jerk cat knocked my glasses off the bedside table and I’m far too pregnant to crouch down low enough to get them, so I dug these out of a closet.”

“And that story,” someone from behind the robot said, “is the best argument in favor of having a robot. We would not have gotten to hear that if you were on the speakerphone.”

So, yes, as it turned out, most of the fears I had about becoming a part-time robot came true—it’s an unruly distraction that often makes me look ridiculous, that falls over and can’t be counted on—and yet my coworkers didn’t lose all respect for me. No, what happened was much more subtle and unexpected than that: EmBot lost her humanity. But I gained mine back.

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from My Life as a Robot