Irina Welsh was born with a gift, and like any good American she was determined to exploit it. Her gift was that of foresight, and her visions of the future were dominated by one indelible image: Automated toilets. She quickly developed a passion for personal plumbing (that is, the plumbing of ones person) as well as ceramics. At the age of twenty-three she set out to design and build the worlds first "Smart-John." After several months of agonizing labor, and one of agonizing tanning in San Juan, she found the notebook that contained her blueprints and started production on her first model. The first Smart-John, dubbed "Phillis," utilizied an altered version of the Rebel-Tiger chess engine for its artificial intelligence chip. Phillis became the first inanimate object ever to adorn the covers of both "Discover" and "Better Homes and Gardens" [Steven Hawking and Ella Fitzgerald are the only humans to accomplish this feat]. Quick to cash in on her success, Welsh sold the prototype to GE who in turn produced and sold more then 100 thousand Smart-Johns within a year.

The one year anniversary of the birth of Phillis was about the time the complaint letters started pouring in. The following is from one such letter:

Dearest Irina,
You have created a monster in the guise of progressive sanitation. No where in your manual does it warn that the Stupid-John has its own will, let alone one that cannot be bent to the whims of any man. Just the other day it refused to open because I had been a little sloppy while urinating the night before. But it's not happy merely controlling its own destiny, no. It wants to control you. Somehow the Smart-John could sense when it was needed, and would always power it self up and turn on the bathroom light just as I would start in its direction. Eventually it got to the point that it would turn it self on when I didn't need to go, and the dull distinctive chirp it gave off upon start up would set my bowels in an uproar. It was a fierce mistress, but not immune to a home made pipe bomb! No amount of money could make up for the damage that vicious beast caused my psyche, as well as my kidneys, but 186 thousand dollars would buy me a really cool boat. So, if you don't wire the money to my account [information attached] by February 23, I will kill you [picture of the gun attached].

Love,
Your killer, Robert Giraffen

Unfortunately for Irina, Robert did not apply proper postage to the letter and it was never delivered. Irina Welsh was gunned down by an unknown assailant outside of her apartment on February 23, 2008. Her legacy lived on though, and was cemented on January 18, 2012 when the Smart-John GE12X defeated Samuel L. Jackson in a regulation chess match.