Mark Rittman is a data specialist from Brighton, the south of England.
Yesterday morning he tried to make a cup of tea with his Wi-Fi enabled kettle.
But he hit a hitch when he tried to connect the iKettle to Amazon's Alexa, a voice-activated system similar to Apple's Siri.
Still haven't had a first cup of tea this morning, debugging the kettle and now iWifi base-station has reset. Boili… https://t.co/5rZzq8XKhU
Later that morning the kettle still wasn't playing ball.
3 hrs later and still no tea. Mandatory recalibration caused wifi base-station reset, now port-scanning network to… https://t.co/MYjWNwpzUa
Rittman said his tweets weren't actually helping, as the number of RTs he was getting apparently caused his home network to fall over (Hadoop is a data set processing engine, indicating that Rittman's home network is more complex than average).
Now the Hadoop cluster in garage is going nuts due to RT to @internetofshit, saturating network + blocking MQTT int… https://t.co/d6veatkcNG
Nevertheless he soldiered on, but before lunchtime the kettle appeared to be becoming sentient and Rittman, presumably absolutely gasping at this stage, became increasingly exasperated.
Now my wifi kettle is basically taking the p*ss. Told me it had found network, now you need to recalibrate me, oh b… https://t.co/dVoGR8qvgP
Many hours of configuration later, and the kettle situation had escalated. And still, no cup of tea.
Well the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we're eating dinner in dark while lights do… https://t.co/XFAxJwaCO2
But then, in the early hours of this morning, victory! Rittman successfully activated the kettle with a voice command, meaning, half a day later, he was able to have that delicious cup of tea, and could finally get on with the important tasks of the day.
My work is done. And now onto everything else I meant to do today, after that first cup of tea.
BuzzFeed News has reached out to Rittman to ask how sweet that post-midnight cup of tea tasted, and whether it was worth persevering with what appeared to be a complicated and unconventional network setup.
And as hundreds of people pointed out, maybe he should invest in a regular, back-up kettle next time.
