ROOMBA NIGHTMARE

(August, 2016) Roomba vacuums are great, right? Except there’s one little flaw. What happens if the Roomba runs over something gross and spreadable like, say, if your dog has an accident in the house? Jesse Newton, a dad in Little Rock, Arkansas, shared on Facebook the horrifying tale of when his Roomba did just that. His Roomba is set to go off every night at 1:30 a.m. When his 3-year-old son crawled into his bed at 3:00 a.m. smelling of poop, Newton knew something was terribly wrong. He went downstairs and discovered his new puppy had had an accident, the Roomba ran over it, and his whole house was covered in poop. Here is some of what he wrote:
– “It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house.”
– “Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she’ll ask if you tried to clean it first.”
– “Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.”
– “The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few YouTube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn’t work. Because you heard the “whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss” noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub.”
* Spreading poop all over the house is the puppy and the 3-year-old’s job.
* Just too lazy to vacuum yourself, eh, Jesse?
* If only there was some sort of cage you could keep a non-housetrained puppy in during the night.
* Meanwhile, the Roomba was thinking, “Why is the carpet getting dirtier the more I clean it?”
* Did he consider, you know, arson?
* That’s a pretty thorough description. This guy should be an archivist.
* Not that he doesn’t have a right to be chapped.
* Hey, nobody said the future would be easy.
* You think every day was easy for Thomas Edison?
* PHONE TOPIC: “My Roomba/Machine Nightmare.” Ever had a run-in with a machine?