The night the automation broke is the night my wife got it
The first automation I ever wrote ran for 2 months and impressed nobody. Then I deleted the whole Z-Wave network, and my wife came home to a dark hallway.
We were living in Northern California while I was at Apple, and I was dabbling. I had a Vera Mi Casa Verde hub and a SmartThings hub (pre-Samsung), which tells you roughly what era this was. I started with a Kwikset smart deadbolt on the garage-to-house door, a Z-Wave light switch in the first-floor hallway, and a garage door controller.
The first automation rule I ever wrote was about as simple as it gets. If the deadbolt on the door from the garage locks or unlocks after sunset, turn on the hallway light. I didn’t have a contact sensor on that door yet, so the lock was the trigger.
It worked. My wife thought it was neat. She was not sold.
I think most people in this trade misread that. Neat is what you say about a thing you’re watching someone else enjoy. She wasn’t against it. She just didn’t see what it was for.
It ran that way for about 2 months. By then I had seven or eight devices.
Then one night I was in the hub settings, tinkering, and I managed to delete the entire Z-Wave network. Every device had to be learned back in, one at a time. I did that, and I thought I was finished. But this was a light switch in the hallway of the first floor of a three-story townhome, and I was almost never on that floor thinking about it. I just forgot it existed.
She came home that night with her arms full of groceries, opened the door from the garage, and the hallway stayed dark. What I heard from the other room was: “Where’s the light?”
Where’s the light. Not “the automation is broken.” Not “your gadget stopped working.” She’d stopped thinking of it as a feature 2 months earlier. Somewhere in there it had quietly become how the house worked, and neither of us noticed until it wasn’t there.
I told her what I’d done — deleted the network, re-paired everything, forgot that one switch. Fixed it that night, or the next day. And after that she was genuinely on board. Not with the hobby, with the value. She’d finally seen what it was for, and she saw it by having it taken away.
I didn’t tinker less after that. I tinkered more. But now when I break something, I fix it.
I’ve written before that the compliment is the absence of a complaint. This is the other side of that coin. Nobody can tell you what a good automation is worth while it’s working, because a working automation is invisible by design.
The only demo that ever really landed in my own house was the one I gave by accident.