Gary across the street has a new hobby. Naturally.
Last Tuesday I walked over to return his hedge trimmers, and he practically dragged me into his entryway by my sleeve to inspect his wall. Well, not the drywall itself. An ancient, greasy Android tablet stuck crookedly between his winter coats and the front door with four gummy strips of double-sided mounting foam.
On the screen? Forty tiny, glowing blue boxes.
"It’s Zigbee to MQTT," he whispered, eyes shining like he was passing state secrets during a submarine drill. "Open-source dashboard. Now I don’t have to hand-wire my topics."
Right. Of course. God forbid any of us should have to hand-wire our topics before breakfast.
Remember when the only thing mounted to the kitchen wall was a mustard-yellow rotary phone with a tangled cord stretched clear into the pantry? You had dial tone, static, and the voice of your sister-in-law telling you about her bunions. Nobody needed a miniature computer the size of a pack of playing cards to manage the humidity in the linen closet.
Gary tapped the glass with a dry knuckle. Nothing. He leaned in, muttering, and jabbed it again with a hollow, plastic thwack that rattled the picture frames. After a three-second delay, an exhaust fan started droning somewhere down the hall with all the enthusiasm of a dying blender.
He beamed at me. A triumphant engineer.
Look, I appreciate the craft. The young man who wrote this dashboard software probably saved hundreds of garage hobbyists from going blind over lines of code. There is real genius in making complicated nonsense slightly less miserable for the people who crave it. But Lord above, the lengths people will go to avoid simply flicking a toggle.
We used to walk into a room, hear a satisfying mechanical clack, and the light came on. Done. Now we need an eight-inch touch terminal to tell us the hallway lamp is drawing three watts—assuming the Wi-Fi hasn't thrown a temper tantrum first.
Have you ever actually surrendered your hallway drywall to a mounted screen, or are you still sticking to plastic switches like a sensible human?
Originally published on Substack.
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