Before school last Tuesday, the girls helped quickly tidy up so I could set the Roomba robot vacuum loose on our way out the door. When I got home 45 minutes later, I heard the Roomba (affectionately named Roombaby) still moving around up above while I switched a load of laundry over to the dryer in the basement. When I came upstairs, though, I was met with silence. The Roomba was gone!
It was nowhere to be found. It was nowhere to be heard. Since Jay's bedroom door was closed and my bedroom is up a few stairs, only 500 square feet were available for it to roam. Our house is not big enough to lose a large round robot, but I couldn't find my Roombaby anywhere! I triple checked all of the rooms: the computer room, bathroom, girls' bedroom, kitchen, and family room. The Roomba was officially lost! I kept walking pointlessly around and around our house, baffled by its disappearance.
There weren't that many places it could be, so where was it? Even though I was pretty sure the Roomba wouldn't fit under the couch, I shined my phone flashlight under there anyways. No round robot shadowed my flashlight beam. I checked under the computer desks. Nada. It wasn't caught behind the toilet or under the kitchen table. The door to the basement was closed, eve though the Roomba has sensors that don't allow it to fall down stairs, so it couldn't have fallen down there.
Where oh where? The app told me "Roombaby is stuck," but it didn't specify where in the house. The fancy pants vacuum sends a map and square footage total of the vacuumed area to the app on my phone but it couldn't tell me where on that map the Roomba was stuck? Ridiculous. Having a robot vacuum is turning me into a techno-dependent snob! I shouldn't have needed a GPS coordinate of my vacuum anyways--how could something that size get lost in such a small space? I was utterly baffled and rather peeved after ten solid minutes of circular searching. I practically could've vacuumed our whole little house myself in the time it took me to hunt for the lost Roomba!
In a last ditch effort, I shined my flashlight under the other side of the couch, and growled in frustrated disbelieving relief. There it was, the lost Roomba, jammed up against the wall and the leg of the couch, with an angry red light glowing in a ring around the power button like an evil angry cyclops. That red light on top of my robot actually kind of freaked me out for a minute--images of that old Will Smith movie I, Robot, flashed through my mind. Red lights on robots mean evil plans of angry AI world domination! But the Roomba was actually very stuck--I couldn't push it out of its jam with a hard shove--so it couldn't have taken over the world or anything that drastic. Probably. With a cleansing breath, I turned my imagination down the more useful avenue of figuring out how to un-stick the stuck Roomba.
The vacuum's bristles were still engaged in the carpet with a surprisingly strong grip, so I couldn't just drag it out from under the couch. Instead I had to heave-ho-pull the couch out a little to assess the situation. The Roomba was still wedged half under the slightly shifted couch. Arg. I lifted the couch up with one hand and unlatched the Roomba's bristly claws from the carpet with my other hand by lifting up.
The thing was heavier than it appeared and not easy to lift one-handed while holding the couch's weight in my other hand. Instead of lifting the entire thing, I kind of lift-pivoted it out of its jam. Using the last bit of my courage, I pushed the scary red light-ringed button, and miraculously the light turned white. Phew! Crisis averted. The Roomba immediately, innocently started vacuuming again like everything was fine, which I suppose it was, except for the lingering irritation that I had just spent fifteen minutes doing search and rescue for a robot. Not to mention living through a brief waking nightmare of angry power-hungry red robots bent on silent violent revolution.
I slid a thick book under the couch to hopefully stop the Roomba from going under and getting stuck again. How am I supposed to block off the entire couch undercarriage next time I set the Roomba loose? I think the Roomba only fits under part of one side of the couch because the rest off the couch sags a little. That must have been how it got stuck, entering on the less-saggy opening and getting wedged in a more saggy section under the couch. Our sprung saggy couch is good for something after all!
Saggy is a gross word.
Robots are high maintenance.
Vacuum lines are Zen.
1 comment:
You. Are. Hilarious!
This is as good as (better than!) any newspaper or magazine humor column!
Post a Comment