While recuperating from my broken ankle, I've been living largely on the second story of my home. I can get down the stairs (and back up) when I need to go to a doctor appointment but it takes a while, strains my healing appendage and kinda requires someone else be present to "spot me," using that term in the way it's used by gymnasts. Basically, I live upstairs where I have my bedroom, two bathrooms, my office and a few other rooms — everything I need except a kitchen.
In one of my upstairs rooms, I have a small refrigerator and a microwave oven but there's a limit to how much good they can be at mealtime. Every morning, my Daredevil Cleaning Lady comes over, cleans up the rooms I inhabit, lays out clean clothes for me to wear, washes the dirty ones, etc. She also goes down to the kitchen, makes me breakfast and brings it up to my office. Sometimes, she brings me lunch the same way…or I order lunch from a meal delivery service. In that case, the food is delivered to my front step and my D.C.L. (or my assistant if she's here then) brings it upstairs. The point is that I don't go downstairs to get food.
For dinner, I sometimes have something in the upstairs fridge I can heat in the microwave but most of the time, I have a friend visiting and we order something delivered. When it arrives on my doorstep, the friend goes down to get the delivery and bring it up. Last night, the friend was a lady named Adriana. She called to say she was on her way and since she was famished, asked that I order dinner so it would be on my front porch around the time she arrived. Obviously, it wouldn't hurt the chow if it sat there five or ten minutes before she got here.
So I used an app to place the order. I got her what she wanted and I ordered chicken parm for myself. A few seconds later, I received a text message confirmation that my order was being prepared…but they would not, like this restaurant had in the past, have someone deliver it to my porch. They were instead sending a robot — one of these…
The app did not ask my OK on this. It just told me that was how I'd be getting my order.
The restaurant is located 1.3 miles from me and ordinarily, a kid driving a Kia would have my order here in under ten minutes. Instead, the robot would take about forty minutes and would then wait outside on the sidewalk for someone to go out and take the meals out of it. There was no way I could have gotten out there myself to do that…which created an element of concern when Adriana texted that she'd suddenly been delayed in leaving her place.
Apparently, there is a way on the app to request that they send a person instead of a robot but I never found it. I also couldn't find out, at least on the app, how long the robot would wait outside with our dinner before it gave up and headed back to where it came from.
I did learn that the robot is not like a self-driving car with no driver. Someone someplace is piloting it. Where this person is and how they control it and what they can see is a complete mystery to me. And in an area where I sometimes can't drive ten blocks without my phone cutting out on me, I wonder what kind of wi-fi connection the robot has with its operator.
I won't keep you in suspense any longer. Adriana got here before the robot so we could both watch from my office window as it approached. It came down a street towards my house and stopped at the corner where there's a traffic light to wait for a WALK signal.
Most of the corners in my neighborhood are beveled like ramps so a person in a wheelchair could cross but the robot wasn't at one of those corners. We watched as it hesitated to "step off" the curb, then it turned and went down the sidewalk until it found a driveway to enable it to cross. On the other side of the street, it located another driveway to get back to the sidewalk and headed towards me.
Finally, it parked itself in front of my house and I received a text message that it was outside and waiting for me. Adriana had to take my cell phone down and press a button on the text message that sent a signal to unlock the robot's lid. She opened it up, took out our food, shut the lid and brought our supper inside while the robot headed back to the restaurant.
The food was good and it was hot. I guess there's some heating element in the robot that keeps it that way. Still, I'm wondering what would happen if I'd ordered two hot entrees plus a frozen dessert. Or something like fried food that just plain isn't that good forty minutes after it's cooked, regardless of how you keep it warm. The robot did not seem large enough to hold a decent-sized pizza and I would think that that's what an awful lot of food delivery orders are about.
So I've decided I don't care for delivery by robot and if I knew more about how it works, I might care even less. How could this be cost-effective? It's not like those Doordash dashers it's displacing are commanding huge paychecks. Are the robots' drivers located in some foreign country where they can be paid nickels? If so, would that save enough to make up for having to design, build and maintain the robots?
Plus, I think you'd have to have a local human presence to service and repair the robots and to jump into action when one gets lost or tips over or is hit by a car or hijacked or its operator loses contact. We can all think of so many possible disasters.
I already don't like how long delivery-by-robot takes compared to delivery-by-human so I called the restaurant today and asked how I could order and specify a non-robotic delivery. The man who answered the phone didn't know and suggested I call the meal delivery service and ask. He seemed very worried that I would stop ordering from his restaurant because of this…and that puzzled me further. To the long list of things I don't understand about this, add the relationship between the restaurant and the company that operates the robots.
And what I really don't know is how many Americans will be thrown outta work by robot delivery drones. If it's a significant number, that alone would be reason enough to not patronize businesses that utilize them. I don't care how Jetsony it feels to get my chicken parm that way.