Robots are good!
Nothing says romance like a vacuum, right? Most of the time, no, but when you’re Mike and I, a Roomba screams “I love you!”
Our house is old and has wood floors and dust seems to settle EVERYWHERE (actually, it doesn’t just settle, it gets married, has babies, and colonizes the entire place). On top of that, I shed like a cat with mange.
In the past (P.R., or pre-Roomba), we swept. A LOT. But the hair and dust and assorted other detritus just got stuck in the broom’s bristles. In essence, each time we swept, we were simply moving the mess from place to place.
The Roomba changed all of that. I was totally surprised when Mike said he’d gotten one. I’d wanted one for some time, but I’m cheap and didn’t want to spend the money on it. Fortunately, Mike trolls the internet for deals (not to mention the fact that he doesn’t mind spending his money on appliances and such. But that’s a whole other blog entry.).
The day the Roomba arrived was magical. The Roomba is small enough to fit under our bed and claw-foot bathtub, so it gets dust bunnies that in areas we rarely clean. It also has a remote control that allows us to drive it from room to room. That’s not the coolest part, though.
You don’t have to do anything with the Roomba, just turn it on. It goes by itself. The Roomba moves from room to room, vacuuming up hair and dust, gently bumping against objects like furniture and walls. This is where the amazing thing about the Roomba comes in– the amazing thing being its brilliant little robot mind.
As the Roomba bumps into things, it makes notes in its computer brain. The Roomba thinks to itself, “Oh, there’s something here. Remember that in the future.” And so it does. In time, as the Roomba gets to know your house, it knows where objects are and learns to avoid them. That allows the machine to clean the areas that it can access and stay away from stuff that doesn’t need to be vacuumed (like the legs of our computer desk).
The other fabulous thing about the Roomba is that it once it’s done using its little robot brain to plot its course around the house (cleaning the entire time, mind you), it calmly makes its way back to the base. That’s right, folks, the robot vacuum goes back to its bases, hops on the charger, and turns off automatically. How cool is that?!?
So now, every few days or so, before leaving the house, one of us will start the Roomba. We leave to do our thing, it does its thing, and when we get home, the floors are free of debris.
Who could ask for anything more?