Eye of the Tiger

I awoke to a noise at 5am one day last week and immediately became aware of two things, one completely understandable and one utterly inexplicable: the first was that the smart speaker in the kitchen was playing music, the second was that the song was “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. I fumbled with my smartphone, first laying on the nightstand, then held by both puzzled, drowsy hands until I could turn it off.

The complexity and brittleness of today’s modern technology didn’t allow me to immediately rule out a purely modern technological explanation for the music playing, e.g. a brown-out, an obscure firmware glitch or a faulty TCP-IP packet. But I had other suspicions, confirmed once I inspected the kitchen: items disturbed in the area of the speaker, and a small amount of cat vomit containing plant matter which matched the plant sitting next to the speaker.

The smart speaker has a capacitive touch control on its top surface, allowing the user to pause/play and increase or decrease the volume. It is rather a sensitive interface, as most smartphone users will acknowledge, that is easily—and not infrequently—inadvertently activated by attempting to wipe off it’s dusty surface with a sleeved arm, or accidentally brushing against it while working in the kitchen.

One of our cats can sometimes become particularly restless early in the morning, and the evidence points toward his foraging on the counter (because he cannot possibly learn to not eat the damn plants that always, always, always make him puke every single time), accidentally activating the smart speaker and then fleeing the scene, knocking over the items during his escape.

“Eye of the Tiger”, indeed.