Everyone Died+My iPhone Stopped Working: An Oral History of The Robot Apocalypse

Those Were The Days

Dottie & Wilbur Ellis, Old People

Dottie and Wilbur are the oldest Robot Apocalypse survivors that we could find. She is the sweetest old woman you'd ever want to meet and he has some opinions that are, shall we say, old-fashioned.

We asked them how they felt about the possibility that the Robot War may soon be coming to an end.

Dottie: Oh, I hope it doesn't.

Wilbur: Me, either.

Dottie: The Robot Apocalypse has been lovely. Just lovely!

Wilbur: Very relaxing.

Dottie: I know that sounds strange, but you have to understand, we come from a simpler time. Back then, we waved to our neighbors. We played outside. We drank from the hose. We wrote letters.

Wilbur: We called chinks chinks and didn't have to use P.C. words like Chinamen. We didn't have to let the Jews play on our golf courses. We could put on blackface and no one made a federal case out of it. We all laughed. Mammy!

Dottie: And most important of all, we talked to each other! We had to. We didn't have all those fancy gizmos. Smartphones. The Cloud. You know, there was a time when you could call a company and actually get a person on the phone!

Wilbur: A person from America! Who spoke English, not Ebonics! They asked you something. They didn't axe you anything!

Dottie: We also respected our elders. I remember spending hours listening to my Grandad tell stories about the Big War.

Wilbur: Back then, we fought wars to win! I mean, what's the point of even having nuclear bombs if you're not going to use them on the sand monkeys? It's preposterous!

Dottie: [pats him on the knee] I know it is, honey.

Grandad talked about the Big War in such vivid detail. It was like you were there! I was fascinated!

Wilbur: Especially since he was never in the Big War.

Dottie: I know! [chuckles] Crazy old coot!

Wilbur: See, back then, you weren't mentally ill. You were crazy. And you weren't mentally challenged, either. You were a retard!

Dottie: One of my happiest memories was when my parents took me to see the 1940 World's Fair in New York.

Wilbur: Before the city was overrun by Puerto Ricans.

Dottie: "The World of Tomorrow" they called it! It was the first time I got to see an honest-to-God robot! I couldn't believe my eyes! His name was Elektro and he was seven feet tall, if you can imagine that! He walked, he talked, he even smoked cigarettes!

Wilbur: They didn't realize that the actual "World of Tomorrow" would have the nanny-state Gestapo who wouldn't let Elektro enjoy a nice cigarette. Hell, if Elektro even had a can of soda pop, they'd probably call the bomb squad. Or the ACLU.

Dottie: Elektro also owned a cute little metal robot dog named Sparko.

Wilbur: That's right, the dog wasn't his companion. He owned it!

Dottie: And as if that wasn't exciting enough, I also got my first look at television! Moving pictures flying through the air! And on the screen, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself!

Wilbur: He was in a wheelchair, you know. Back then, you weren't otherly abled or handi-capable, whatever the hell that means. You were a God damn cripple!

Dottie: [pats his knee] Yes, you were, sweetie.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that World's Fair showed us how humanity would end. Not because of the robots, but because of the screens. We had already been staring at movie screens, but at least we were in a theater, with our friends and neighbors. A community.

Wilbur: A community of your own kind. No mud people allowed, thank you very much.

Dottie: With television, we brought the screens into our living rooms. It was great fun. Howdy Doody, Ed Sullivan, I Love Lucy.

Wilbur: Back then, you could do a TV show about straight people. Towards the end it was nothing but homos! Homos as far as the eye could see!

Dottie: Of course, we weren't watching with the community so much, but at least we were with our families.

Wilbur: Not that families mattered any more. Who needs a husband when you can let the government raise your children! It takes a village, doncha know?

Dottie: But then there were the computer screens, and we stared at them all by ourselves. But at least we had to get up and walk away sometimes. Be part of the world.

Wilbur: A world where men wanted to be women and women wanted to be men and everybody wanted their own special bathrooms! It is just me, or should people just be happy with what God gave them?

Dottie: [pats him on the knee] It's not just you, love bug.

But of course the screens kept getting smaller. With our great-grandkids, they always had a screen with them, right in the palm of their hand! They were in their own little bubble, disconnected from everyone around them.

Wilbur: Everyone sending pictures of their private parts to everybody else! So you know what they were doing with the palm of their other hand!

Dottie: Our great-grandkids certainly didn't care about us. How could two boring old folks compete with the non-stop stream of entertainment? They barely even noticed us. We were like the Ghosts of Real Life.

Wilbur: I thought someone should have beaten some sense into those kids, like my Dad did to me, but that became child abuse. I guess those bleeding-heart child psychologists knew more than the Bible.

Dottie: But everything changed after the robots came. See, the screens didn't work any more.

Wilbur: They cried like little girls. Which, according to the FemiNazis is a sexist thing to say, even when you say it about little girls!

Dottie: No more fancy gizmos. No more smartphones. No more Cloud. They had no choice. They had to talk to us!

Wilbur: I told them my war stories. Real ones! About how people kept saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas until I straightened them out!

Dottie: We've been having so much fun with the kids! We play hide and seek and sing songs and go for walks. We read to the little ones. We play board games and card games. They draw pictures and put on funny little skits for us. It's all so sweet! I mean, we don't miss anything from before!

Wilbur: Except Viagra.

Dottie: [sighs longingly] But do you know what the youngest one, Sean, said to me just yesterday? "Great Gramma, you're so interesting!" Can you imagine a six year old boy saying something like that?

Wilbur: And do you know what he said to me? "Great Grampa, I just threw a bottle at a Dago!"

Dottie: So for us, the robots aren't a threat to humanity, they saved our humanity. So we're perfectly content for things to stay the way they are.

Wilbur: Although maybe we should have a separate camp for the Jews.

Dottie: [silence]

Wilbur: Too far?

Dottie: [pats him on the knee] Yes, pookie. Too far.