Waldo and Mama: Alexa

A few weeks ago now, Mama ordered three Alexa Echo Dot's. Some scares happened in the house, and we want to make sure that if an emergency happens and someone needs help in another room, they'll get it as soon as possible. Mama could not hear one of her boys and panicked. They were fine, but it made Mama realize that this needed to happen. So first we ordered two. One for the kitchen and one for the boys room. A day or so later, we ordered one for the grown up room. Mama will find herself hiding in there some days and still needs to be accessible. For a week or so, they worked great. The boys love them. They are useful. It takes away the up and down of the stairs for Mama in the morning. One boy is really hard to get up for his meds. There are mornings Mama makes several trips to their bedroom to get them up. Alexa alleviates that. Mama doesn't really know how to use "drop in" yet, but announce is easy, even if it goes to all the dots. That is ok.

Mama started to really like the Alexa in her room. You can tell it to play music, and that is calming for some people with PTSD. We enjoyed listing to music to fall asleep. Dad Man likes when he says, "Alexa, tell me a dad joke." Then one day something happened. Alexa sounded terrible. Mama though maybe it was the location. She still wanted it on that particular wall, but moved it to various places trying to see if it improved the sound. Nothing.

Finally, last night Mama contacted Amazon to see if she could get a replacement. We didn't want to be without the Alexa in the room, even if it was a waiting period to get the new one. But alas, it sounded dreadful. After figuring out how to contact a person, they told her she could have a refund. Mama didn't want a refund. She just wanted it to work. Mama had gotten them on sale, and we couldn't replace it with the refund. The human on the other end put us on hold for a long while. Finally a new person came on. They told Mama to unplug the Alexa, wait ten seconds and plug it back in. After a few minutes it came back up. Ok, lets try it.