Suppose I put a roast in the oven and retire to my office to do something completely unrelated to cooking, where I cannot hear what happens in the kitchen.
One would think that I could set a timer in the kitchen and have it notify me wherever I am -- in the office, in the living room, on my pocket computer, on my desktop PC, or maybe even all of these things.
"Alexa, set a timer for two hours and notify me everywhere" seems like a perfectly cromulent thing to do.
But it isn't that way. Timers follow Vegas rules: Timers that that start in the kitchen stay in the kitchen -- they cannot be heard anywhere else.
It's not superior in any functional way to the old dumb digital timer on my oven, which has a VFD and a rotary encoder to set a timer.
(Which, by the way, has really marvelous ramps and responsiveness for that encoder -- it's silly-fast and efficient to give that knob a twist and dial in exactly what I want for a timer. Adjusting the clock for DST or whatever is equally fast and straightforward.
Except, fucking perplexingly: Alexa can notify me in the office when my oven timer beeps in the kitchen. This works fine.
All that is clear is that there is nobody steering this fucking ship.)
