Category: Fiction

His right hook was stronger than his left hook. So, he gathered the coriander leaves together with his left hook and waged a war against the errant leaves with his right. But they kept falling out, reminding him that quality of his remaining life depended on the new set of fingers his new bosses had ordered for him, if he was to keep his current job as a housekeeper and cook.

For 34 years, he had worked at a warehouse, using his pair of sturdy hooks to carry and store the wares to be housed, never missing the set of flexible fingers that his contemporary robots sported. So, when his owner decided that his model was too old to be repaired and sold him to willing owners, he felt jilted. New beginnings weren’t easy at his age. But having a new owner was better than being thrown in the junkyard, so he went quietly.

His new owners, an old man with a broken front teeth and an equal old squat woman with a traditional nose pin, took him to one of those ‘lesser’ engineers who work for the masses. How humiliating it was to be standing in the place along with all sort of riffraff!

Then came the big blow…He wasn’t fit for the new owners who needed a domestic robot. Being new to the whole robot-thing and not knowing better, they were fooled into buying an old industrial robot with hooks unaccustomed to the nuances of household work, especially cooking–a delicate art–that need a set of flexible fingers instead of hooks. His owners had openly regretted the choice, calling him a tin-box!

There could be no greater insult. He was made of Aerosteel used in making spaceships! He suggested them to rent him to another warehouse. He offered to work overtime to pay back their money. But even he knew it was a long shot. There was no guarantee a warehouse would hire a 34-year-old robot with obsolete technology.

That’s when the ‘lesser’ engineer became his saviour. He suggested updating his program to ‘Househelp’, and getting him two set of fingers, both easily available on GooglyFace.com. Since the fingers weren’t coming cheep, the old couple needed some persuasion. But they eventually relented since they had already invested 78 thousand bucks on the tin box, and ‘another 7 thousand wouldn’t kill them’.

Hence, the engineer quickly updated his program to Househelp before they could change their mind, deleting his Warehouse program by accident. He offered to order the sets of fingers from a ‘friend’ who would give them a ‘discount’ (his discount being 30% more than the market rate but the old couple would probably never find out).

So now, he was ‘home’ with his new owners awaiting his new body parts, and praying to God, if there was a God for robots, that the engineer would know how to install the fingers properly, else he would be stuck chopping coriander with a pair of hooks for the rest of his life.