Me:
Leave the crock pot on before work, setting a reminder with Siri to turn it off later. Attempt to VPN home, but find yourself able to do so on your laptop, but not on your phone. Meanwhile, the app which controls the smart plug into which the crock pot is plugged, only runs on the phone. Attempt to configure the VPN on the phone, spend time copy/pasting blocks of text to overcome OpenVPN errors in the Android app. Finally get to the point where the error received indicates that only “dev tun” mode works, rather than the “dev tap” mode the router currently uses. Attempt to change via SSH and lose laptop connectivity. Restore laptop connectivity, only to realize that it’s not meaningfully possible to reconfigure the VPN mode without the webUI, which isn’t accessible over the VPN. Download BlueStacks and the Android app, reconfigure the network stack to send traffic out the VPN interface, and finally get the crock pot turned off.
Everyone else:
Call next door neighbor who has a key.
I am reminded of an episode of the Big Bang Theory where the guys use the internet to send a signal that bounced halfway around the world, just to turn on a lamp that was sitting in their living room. When Penny asked ‘why’ they simply said ‘because we can’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqp8_ROAIJY
At least the BBT crew did what they did for fun. Your scenario sounds to me like you just prefer to over-complicate absolutely everything in your life. LOL. :-)