Scott Alexander

One morning around six, the police banged on our door.

"'Open up!'

they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won't.

I was awake at the time because the kids were up early and I was on shift."

I opened the door.

The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes.

They said they'd gotten a 911 call from my house with plenty of screaming.

Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?

I never did figure out how the police got called.

My first guess was that one of the twins had gotten their hands on a phone and dialed random things, but neither mine nor my wife's call history showed anything incriminating.

My second guess was that they'd screamed at Alexa so hard that it called emergency services.

But the documentation says Alexa doesn't have that function.

Maybe a neighbor called and the police got the location wrong.

I don't know.

I do have a pretty good idea about the screaming, though.

When Kai demanded The Sun's Song, in quotes, I had accidentally told Alexa to play Rafi's version of Mr. Golden's Son instead of Super Simple Songs' version.

Kai did not consider this a sufficiently faithful rendition and made his displeasure clear to everyone in the neighborhood at six in the morning.

Then Lyra didn't like that Kai was screaming, and started screaming too.

By the time I realised the song mishap, I couldn't rectify my mistake, because they were screaming too loud for Alexa to hear my commands.

And too loud for them to notice if the song changed anyway.