Potential story prompt idea: Amazon's new Dash button · 4:22pm Oct 20th, 2015
Because there's no way this could ever go wrong.
Here's the idea. Amazon has made twenty-nine devices which can be stuck onto the surface of your choice. Let's say, for example, that you got the toilet paper button. (We can all guess where you're going to stick it.)
And you notice you're running low on toilet paper. You press the button, which hooks up to your WiFi network (you have one, right?), which contacts Amazon, which decides you want toilet paper and debits the cost from your account before shipping it to you, and considering that you're ordering toilet paper, probably not in time.
It's in the trial phase right now. They want people to give these a test, so the cost of the device is removed from the first order you place using it. And, well... this has to be firmly established: it's a button. It's a button with bright colors which you leave out in the open so you can press the thing when it's most needed.
Those of you with children, siblings, and particularly active pets may be starting to see the problem. One hyperactive parakeet can turn your house into a toilet paper supply warehouse within five minutes, plus shipping time. If it's in the wrong place, you might press it by accident. A few times. Have friends over? Are they slightly drunk, mad at you, or in the mood for a prank? Really, there are so many ways you're going to be in the toilet paper business, and all of them were already charged to your account.
But those are problems for the real world.
In Equestria (and possibly some versions of Earth, if you love trial phases which don't quite hit the original target), the Dash button clearly has another function entirely. It summons Rainbow.
Whether she likes it or not.
If you can't do something horribly evil with this, you're just not trying hard enough.
Hmm...
Ideas are percolating...
Hoooooooooooly shit.
A button for ALL of the Mane 6...!
~Skeeter The Lurker
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So, does she get involuntarily teleported directly to the home, or is she pulled into the warehouse, stuffed into a box, and spends two days in the postal system while being shipped to a Prime member?
Yes, it can be both.
The Pinkie Pie button would be weird, because she'd show up when you intended to press the button, before you actually pressed it.
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"Man, I want some cake. I know! I'll summon Pinkie Pie. Now, where did I leave that button?"
"Here it is!"
"Oh, thanks, Pinkie! Wait, you're here! Cool, I guess I don't need the button anymore."
"Uh, you kinda have to push the button, though."
"Why should I, if you're already here?"
"Because my Pinkie sense said you would, which is why I'm here in the first place. If you don't push the button, there's going to be a psychic feedback loop that will give me one woozy-doozy of a headache. And possibly rip a hole in reality. And that would be bad. And then there would be no cake."
"So, what you're saying is..."
"Push the button, Frank."
(Please note: That last bit is an MST3k reference, and not my actual name
)
Rarity abuses it, and soon Rainbow Dash always dresses in style.
On the plus side, it summons Rainbow. On the negative side, it summons Rainbow.
Turns out Rainbows are not always happy and cheerful.
So I could summon Rainbow to come clean my....
house?
Shut up and take my money!
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As long as they remember the air-holes, she should be fine.
I was just looking at the available buttons. They have a Kraft Mac and Cheese button. The future is wonderful.
Of course, now I'm thinking that I'd press that button and Big Mac would show up with a wheel of cheese.
Also, they need a muffin button.
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I'm guessing that when it comes to housecleaning, Rainbow is a devoted member of The Church Of The Infinitely Crammable Closet. (Those who open it are sent to The Bad Place: namely, the underside of the pile which just fell on them.)
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Of course, you'd just get a box containing a few surviving crumbs, plus one vaguely guilty look.
"I emptied your shipment."
(The Mac & Cheese button feels like a story-ending punchline after returning/losing/seeing the original button destroyed.)
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"I don't know why you're complaining. I told you I'd clean that mess in ten seconds flat."
"Rainbow Dash, you created a tornado. I don't have a house anymore!"
"Yeah, but.. the mess is gone, right?"
inb4 "My Little Dash Button."
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There's a scene in the original Flash TV series where a newly-empowered Barry is attempting to clean his house at hyperspeed. It goes beautifully in the initial stages, right up until he pulls out the vacuum cleaner and starts moving in a circular pattern, fast enough to get a dust devil going -- which pretty much undoes all the good accomplished in Phase One, and then some.
Multiply by resident prismatic ego and apply to fresh wreckage.
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You are a horrible evil person and I wish to subscribe to your publication.
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So... What happens if you press the button more than once? Or, if two ponies press their buttons simultaneously?
.............Mirror-Pool, anyone?
"Too Many Rainbow Dashes"?
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Instead of a "Friendship Table", Celestia passes out "Friendship Problem Buttons." If a pony has a friendship problem, whack the button.
a.fod4.com/images/user_photos/1185548/staples-easy-button-1_square_fullsize.png
"That was easy"
The story idea is good - I like where some of the commenters are taking it - but your vision of the real-world worst case scenario seems to have occurred to the people at Amazon as well (it's as if they have some adults with brains on staff...). Thus the page you linked to explicitly states that you get notified and can cancel the order easily (at least until it ships, which would presumably be the next day, at the earliest) and you can't place more than one order, unless you specifically went into the settings and disabled that safeguard.
As for the wi-fi requirement, I think it's pretty safe to assume that a person, who habitually orders their household items via the internet and is interested in a gadget like this, would at least have wi-fi-capable smartphone and likely a WLAN router as well.
No, no, no, what you need is to combine the two ideas. You press a button to instantly order [product] and then it gets delivered by a supersonic pegasus 5 minutes later.
Amazon is not liable for damages resulting from sonic shockwave including but not limited to broken windows, burst eardrums and panicked household animals. Additional charges may apply for deliveries above weight limit.
Or you get the Mrs. Dash button and every time you press the thing, it puts Rainbow in a completely random marriage.
Mail-Order Bride.
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For new tech releases, I generally assume the Apple model is in effect. "It beeped. Ship it. The customers will figure out how to fix the rest." And when I'm not assuming that, I go back to the classic rule: nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious. Someone will break this and blame Amazon for it.
Also, who said I read down that far?
So when does Sweetie Belle get a Button button so she can button mash for Button Mash?
3484291 Translation quantity errors are a possiblity too. We had an office back in the 80's who ordered antifreeze for their vehicles. 20 gallons. Somehow that got translated to 20 *pallets* at the order depot. Truck pulls up to the office. Where do you want your antifreeze? Stack it over there. It won't fit. Huh? The whole truck's full. (pause) Let me call the main office. Couldn't send it back, it was already paid for and approved. Wound up distributing it around all of our offices for a few years, but we had the best antifreezed vehicles ever for a while.
Rainbow delivers toilet paper?
Rainbow walks into a house calling "Is any pony home?"
"Yeah, in here!" Is the reply.
She opens the door, to a scene of indescribable biological horror.
Que shouting, puking, a supersonic exit.
And a box of toilet paper somewhere between where it is most needed, and the mach-cone of the departing pegasus. Possibly on fire...
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*weeps for ponykind*
So...
People are not just too lazy to walk to a store and buy stuff, they're too lazy to even use a web store manually? Or at least, that's what amazon thinks?
The Twilight Sparkle button will bring over a alicorn who will organize everything. And, we do mean everything...even the stuff you don't want organized. Or to ever see the light of day.
The Applejack button sends you a Earth pony that you'll never notice came around.
The Rarity button will make everything fashionable. Just make sure to be clear what kind of fashionable you want...
The Fluttershy button brings over probably the best pet assistant you could ever want. Just, don't ask her to fix something...
The Pinkie Pie buttons brings you a very enthusiastic party planner. Diabetic comas are not Amazon.com's responsibility and it says so in the contract.
You give the CMC button to somebody you don't like. Preferably on the other side of town, where you can watch the fireworks.
The Discord button isn't actually a button. It's just whatever surface you touched moments before he decided to show up.
Needless to say, they're working the bugs out of that one.
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That I can absolutely believe. There is no limit to the stupidity and entitlement of the average consumer that science has been able to determine.
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Why wouldn't they think that? It's not as if human nature has given them any reason to doubt it.
A button that compels her to fly to you at top speed? Give one to every member of her fan club, so they can ask her for autographs. Oh, and also scatter the fans around Ponyville, maybe all of Equestria. When she's racing with the Wonderbolts, press it right before she crosses the finish line. Tie it to a stick attached to her back and dangle it in front of her.
Another fine product from Flim and Flam.
"How do we secure the young mare's cooperation, brother 'o mine?"
"Simple. She owes us money. She can work off her debt."
"How do you figure that?"
"Simple. She had the audacity to be named after our product some twenty years before we came up with it. We just need a retroactive patent. We simply have our patent lawyer write her employment contract as well."
"You're a genius!"
Evil is implied.
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Now that's what I call free shipping.
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And by "working the bugs out of that one", what you mean is that they're trying to shoo all of the butterflies out of the button casing. (How did those even fit? It's chaos magic, don't ask.)
This tells me I need to start looking at poorly thought-out real-world ideas and reconsidering them in light of fanfiction. :)
It being a button in the bathroom will probably always remind me of a scene from Hidamari Sketch.
Scene (hidden for the sake of those who don't care):
Yuno, Miyako, and a couple of schoolmates are cleaning up in the school restrooms. Yuno, one of the shorter students, is trying to put something on a shelf. Instead of more sensibly getting Miyako to do it, she jumps to push it on there. But upward motion transfers to the key in her pocket, which keeps going as she comes down, and it lands in the toilet. Worse, she lands in such a way as to make her stabilize herself against the wall... where the flush button is, and away goes her apartment key, into the sewer system. They notify the landlady of the problem, and Yuno stays the night at Miyako's. In the manga, the landlady comes with a working key -- or, more precisely, a box of keys that Yuno has to sift through -- the next day, but in the anime adaptation, she ends up staying the night in all five of her blockmates' apartments (one in the same year, two senpai, and two kouhai) and the classmates from earlier have offered to let her stay with them when the landlady comes bearing the aforementioned box... which was in an unlocked shed a few feet from the apartments. As you might imagine, this raises security concerns.
So yeah, finding a place that is neither too hard to get to nor too easy to press by accident could be a challenge. For now, we'll just stick to the store in town.
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But it's only good for two days.
http://tukari-g3.deviantart.com/art/INSTANT-RAINBOWDASH-Flash-211317101
At least give a bit of credit to Amazon, they did at least plan for the "toddler orders 100 cases of toilet paper" situation. Seriously though, people are too lazy to click through a couple screens ~1 time a month?
With regard to the real world device, just imagine the customer service/tech-support calls when the batteries run flat...
What happens if Rainbow Dash pushes the Dash button? Implosion, or just instant success?
Also, I like to think the button just sends out a high-pitched noise that only Rainbow Dash can hear, no matter where she is. So she flies around wildly until she finds the source and that's how she arrives. Angry and pushing the button to shut it off while glaring at you.
3484541 Copyright-lawsuits in a world where time-spells exist, in a nutshell.
3486529 Yep. Just imagine the patent troll mindset having access to time travel...
Suddenly the reason that Equestria is still at a pre-industrial tech level is explained. Any pony that invents anything gets sued.
3486718 Yeah... Just imagine the lawsuits a bootstrap paradox could create.
Time traveling lawyers. Celestia help us all.
....If anybody writes that, please let it have a happy ending, with the law-agency suing its past self and erasing themselves from existence. Or ending the story in an ambivalent, binary "paradox"-state or some kind that requires two different outcomes to be true at the same time. One of which is a peaceful, prosperous Equestria without copyright-lawsuits. Then everyone can pick the ending they like.
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Good thing we know that time travel isn't possible. How do we know this? Because the registered Patent #1 is not for a time machine.
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For anypony who's lazy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Patent_No._1
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Even worse: whenever someone pushes the button, she spawns in their toilet along with the paper. It's kinda awkward.