People always say that you have to be careful when you’re introducing pets to each other. You don’t want to have a dog that wants to tear your cat’s head off any more than you want to have a pair of cats who absolutely hate each other. It can be difficult to maintain a peaceful household if you wind up with animals who decide that they need to fight to the death. Well, nobody ever warned you about making sure that your technology gets along. That was something that I had to find out the hard way when I recently purchased a smart thermostat which was developed by the people behind Apple. It turns out, this air quality control device doesn’t exactly like Google products… Like our family Alexa system. The smart thermostat and our electronic helper absolutely refuse to talk to each other or get the right message across. Everyday when I wake up and ask Alexa about the outdoor air temperature, somehow my smart thermostat starts changing the air quality control settings that were programmed weeks ago. When I ask Alexa to readjust the smart thermostat, suddenly the forced air furnace has been turning on rather than decreasing the power level of the air conditioner. If I go to the smart thermostat and directly change the programming from the touchscreen air quality control panel, I can hear Alexa in the kitchen telling me that she doesn’t understand. I don’t know why the smart thermostat and the personal assistant bot seemed to have such an intensive sibling rivalry. However, I can tell you that things have stupidly heated up in our house since we tried to go smart.