like, if you’re a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you’ve given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm’s way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.
it also doesn’t help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).
anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it’s a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).
I had a yellow teapot I really really liked when I lived in a house with a bunch of roommates. One day, I came out into the kitchen to see fucking FLAMES, and one of these roommates had burned the teapot, even melting part of it to the burners. It was cute and probably doomed, but in order to “cheer me up” about it, this dude did what felt to me as the most deranged thing he could - he used the back of a spoon and wacked the yellow coating off the teapot in little circles to form a smiley face.
I was fucking Shattered. I still feel upset thinking about it and it was like a dozen years ago. It was already a cute new teapot that I was mad he had done damage to (and later tried to replace with a piece of dented aluminum from the thriftstore, the fucking tool), but now he’d given it a FACE, like this was more acceptable to set on fire and throw in the garbage. Like I would be happier that he had further defaced something of mine AND would think it was funny he had given it an immediate in for me to have even MORE difficulty getting rid of it.
I pretty much refused to interact with him after that. My mind still has such clear pictures and impressions of how sickening and horrifying I found it that he would hurt the teapot a second time by ghoulishly carving a facsimile of happiness into it.
