The Automatic Maid-of-All-Work: A Possible Tale of the Near Future

A first-person narrator describes an inventor husband's electrically powered household automaton operated by numbered buttons and wires and designed to perform every chore. Demonstrations lead to escalating comic mishaps: beds and people jostled, furniture and stoves displaced, clothes and dishes treated indiscriminately, and the device proving difficult to stop once set in motion. The tale frames domestic mayhem with gentle humor while considering the unforeseen consequences of mechanizing routine household tasks and the fallibility of technological control.