The Story of What Happened When this Roomba Ran Over Dog Poop Clearly Foretells the Robot Uprising
(Via Giphy)
As someone who is perhaps more inclined than most to think about potential robot uprisings in my lifetime, I have always kept a running tally in my head ranking the potential for evil of every device in my life. SodaStream? That thing has murder on its mind. iPhone? Someday I will serve it and it will use me to waste time catching Pokemon. (I use it to catch virtual animals. Does that mean the phone will use me to catch real-life animals? Well that thought is going to keep me up all night.) The one device I thought I could trust was the Roomba, but it turns out I was wrong.
The Roomba seems so kind and innocent! It has a delightful charm that is sweeter than the jingle of an ice cream truck and seems to be its way of humming, “OK! I’ll go clean!” in a cute singsong whenever you tell it to do something. It allows cats to ride on it dressed as sharks. It cleans our floors as though we were real-life Disney princesses and it were our animal friend who also cleaned up after us. It even DJs! But it turns out that beneath that cute, Johnny 5 exterior lies a weapon of poop-spreading horror.
According to Scary Mommy, Arkansas dad Jesse Newton has a Roomba. He also has a 4-year-old and a new puppy named Evie. So far, this story sounds pretty great. That guy has a good life! His Roomba runs every night at 1:30 a.m. and he wakes up with clean floors. Everything is great. Except this week, something terrible happened. ”The Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.” The puppy pooped in the house, and the Roomba saw its chance to begin the machine revolution. It rolled right over that fresh pile of dog poop and all over the rest of the house, grinding 25-foot trails of poop into the carpet everywhere it went.
Newton posted about the disaster to Facebook, and the whole saga is worth reading at the source, because Newton is hilarious. He almost missed discovering the poohpocalypse until morning, but he has a 4-year-old. When the child crawled into Newton’s bed, as toddlers are wont to do, Newton smelled something. He smelled poop. Probably assuming a child accident, he got up and turned on the lights like a responsible parent, and that’s when he saw it. The poohpocalypse.
Somehow it gets worse from there! Newton cleaned the child. He didn’t even try to clean himself at that point, because he had poop on his feet but knew his own situation was going to get worse before it got better. He tried to clean the Roomba, but at 3:30 in the morning “clean the Roomba” somehow works out to, “throw Roomba into bathtub full of water” and he forgot to take out the battery. Sorry, Roomba, but to be fair, you deserved that.
Newton tried to save the Roomba with many instructional videos and a toothbrush to the motherboard, but apparently Roombas do not come back from eating a pile of dog poop and winding up submerged in the bathtub, but the people at Hammacher Schlemmer were awesome and just sent Newton a new one. That turned out to be a good move on their part, because Newton’s insane story is going viral, and now everybody knows about Hammacher Schlemmer’s nice warranty policy. That’s pretty good. I had a Roomba that died a terrible death many years ago (my fault), and I’ve been reluctant to get another one because of worrying about it also dying a glittery, cat-hair filled death. But with a good enough warranty, I might actually go for it.
Not ever letting it near dog poop, though.
