Talking to Flo

Last night after an extensive day of work, a wonderful concert, and dinner out, Spadoodles asked me to help her with Delilah. She figured out on her own how to import songs onto her, and only needed a bit of guidance here and there. But last night she had hit a wall. I'm not terribly techy, but I agreed to help her sift through some sites she had received from a friend and try to get The Importance of Being Ernest onto that tiny screen.

We ran into a few issues, the main one being that it is really hard to read the computer screen (excuse me, Flo) when you are yawning every 10 seconds. I was having a hard time focusing my eye balls on the texts when suddenly Flo froze. And if I might add, she was frozen in a very inconvenient place for me to read the text I needed to read.

Spadoodles had left the room for some mysterious reason, and when she reappeared, I said, "I cannot work with this device if it's going to freeze on me."

Her response caught me off guard.

"Turn down the speakers."

What?

I repeated myself, "I don't think I can get the movie thing to work tonight if this computer doesn't stop freezing."

Without hesitating, she reached over to turn the volume knob on the speakers down to off. "You need to call her Flo; that's her name. I don't want Flo to hear you talking about her that way."

I'm sure I looked something like a freshly-caught cod fish with my mouth hanging open the way it was, but she continued to babble on as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said. Now, understand that I have no problem with naming things, in fact, my guitar is named Cato, my computer is named Fern and my pillow is named Andrew. But... I don't treat them like people. The one of the main reasons I have for naming objects is for easy referencing. "Hey, have you seen Fern?"

Needless to say, Spadoodles and I discussed her need to talk to devices (with Flo's speakers still turned down, of course), but she still wasn't convinced that there was anything strange about it.

Then my mom poked her head into the office to say goodnight.

"Mom," she started, "what's wrong with talking to Flo?"

"Well, she's a computer, dear. Goodnight." And with that she exited the room.

Now it was Spadoodles turn to resemble a cod fish. She sputtered and gasped out that it just wasn't right to not talk to Flo like she was a person. Being tired, I excused myself and promised Spadoodles that we would work on the movie thing in the morning.

So, that's the story. And now you all know that not only does Spadoodles name her devices, she also treats them very well. :)