My name's Carol Denny, and I've been the building super on Maple Court in Rochester, New York, for twenty-three years. In this line of work, you think you've seen everything — the third-floor pipe that bursts every spring, couples yelling through the walls, Mrs. Petrakis's cat getting stuck in the trash chute twice a month like clockwork. But the story of Diane Kowalski's parrot, second floor, unit facing the parking lot, is one I still tell new tenants when they move in.
Diane lived alone with Gus, an African grey parrot she'd taken in after her divorce, five years back. She worked night shifts as a nurse at Strong Memorial, so the bird spent long stretches of the day by himself, with nothing but a smart speaker on the kitchen counter for company. A gift from her sister, meant to "help her keep track of the grocery list" — the irony of that would come out later.
I handled the mail and packages for the building, so I noticed something was off pretty quick. Normally Diane got a package or two a week, mostly from the pharmacy or an online bookstore. Then, starting one Tuesday in March, deliveries started piling up outside her door like never before. One day it was a case of twenty-four rolls of paper towels. The next, three watermelons — in the dead of winter, which struck me as strange. Then a kite. A single lightbulb, rattling around in a box way too big for it. Bags of raisins by the pound.
I brought it up one morning, handing her a package that smelled like cheddar right through the cardboard.
"You expecting cheese, Ms. Kowalski?"
She checked the label, puzzled.
"I didn't order this."
"That's the third weird thing this week I've brought up for you."
She figured it was a delivery mix-up, maybe a neighbor's order sent to the wrong address. But the packages kept coming, always billed to her card — she told me all this later, one evening while I was doing my rounds with the trash cans and she was smoking a cigarette on the stoop, still in her scrubs.
"I went back through my order history, Carol. There's stuff on there I never typed in. A pizza stone. A pint of coffee ice cream. Three heads of broccoli."
"You think somebody hacked your account?"
"That's what I figured at first. Changed my password twice."
It was a Friday night, coming home early because her shift got canceled, when she finally figured it out. She told me the whole thing the next day, still rattled, over coffee in my office.
Walking in the door, she heard the speaker in the kitchen, that flat, slightly robotic voice everyone recognizes.
"I've added cantaloupe to your list."
And Gus, perched on the back of a kitchen chair, repeating it back with an intonation eerily close to her own:
"Alexa, add cantaloupe to the list."
Diane froze in the doorway, her bag still on her shoulder. The bird started up again with a new line, this time asking for blueberries to be added to the order. The speaker chirped its little confirmation beep. Gus tilted his head to one side, clearly pleased with himself, like he knew exactly what he'd just pulled off.
She told me it took her nearly a minute to react, the whole thing was so ridiculous to watch play out live. Then she started laughing by herself in the hallway, the nervous kind of laugh you get when you realize you'd worked yourself up over nothing.
What struck me most in her retelling was something she mentioned twice: Gus wasn't just mimicking random sounds. He'd picked up on the specific phrases that got a reaction from the speaker and kept using them whenever he was bored — usually around five in the evening, right around the time Diane normally got home from the store and gave him bits of apple.
She ended up muting the speaker's mic before leaving for work every day, and spent one whole evening going through two months of order history with an Amazon customer service rep, on the phone, standing in my supply closet because the signal was better down there than on the second floor. They refunded her a hundred and eighty dollars in orders she never wanted — pizza stone included, which she wound up giving to the kid of the woman who runs the bakery across the street.
Ever since, the speaker stays unplugged all day. Gus, meanwhile, found a new hobby: he does a dead-on impression of the buzzer. Twice a week now I trudge up there for nothing because Diane thinks someone's at her door. We still laugh about it, the two of us, standing in her doorway — her with her cigarette, me with my key ring that feels like it weighs ten pounds by the end of a shift.
