Roomba #5
It was a sunny, beautiful day, and I made brunch for 12 people, like I do, and they rewarded me with an intervention.
You know I got a dog in April. The dog is a shedder. No, more than that. You don’t know the depths of this. I can furminate a Chicago softball of fur within a day. I can generate a whole second dog within a week. My home has become covered with a soft layer of yellow fur, and all of my floors are dark.
Meanwhile, I hate vacuuming more than any other chore. I put it off for preposterous amounts of time. Nothing is dusted. I complained about this, which was a mistake, because then the intervention began.
“Have you thought about getting a Roomba?”
Yes, I have. I have thoughts all the time.
I resist new technology at all costs. I don’t need new devices. I have too many devices. I am not an early adopter. I hate replacing things. I hate e-waste. I have the dumbest home of anyone who works in this industry. Someone once asked me why my blinds don’t automatically open & closed with the time of day, and I just laughed at them. I’m still laughing at them.
I’ve heard so many stories of products bricking because their creators went under, or DRM’d plastic bags, or being locked into horrible systems that just cost more than they have any right to.
I calmly explained all of this to everyone, and to my friends’ immense credit they waited until I finished my statement before unanimously interventioning me.
Given infinite time, one becomes the thing one hates. And so I didn’t get a Roomba. I got two. I might get a third.
There are, after all, three floors of my house. And the first floor’s Roomba worked so well, at first, to be moderately life-altering.
I marvel at the tech inside of this thing, which is so significant as to give this object something of a rudimentary personality as it trundles around in pursuit of grime. Roomba’s QA department must be something else. Just imagine the fake rooms they devise to try and throw this thing off. Or the wild stories their support must hear.
When I was visiting colleges, one of them had a prominent slalom course painted in their main quad; they would race robots there every year. After a brief search, it looks like the competition remains ongoing. As new developments like Lidar and more sensitive gyroscopes end up in our devices, I suspect the bar just gets upped, and it gets just as hard to make something that can roll downhill and navigate a curved white line. Roomba is the endpoint of this. Or maybe self-driving? Let’s assume Roomba. It is harmless when the thing gets stuck while trying to dock, or when the dog lays down in front of it. Cars are another matter.
The merciful thing about Roomba is that their dumb proprietary bags are easily procured by a third party at significantly reduced cost. And you can presumably empty them yourself and reuse them. The industrial design of them is a quiet triumph, with a plastic clasp that shuts as you remove the bag from the vacuum unit, and opens as you insert it inside. It is effectively foolproof and no-mess, and I gasped the first time I used it.
Everybody refined the idea of Roomba before I arrived, I reckon, so I didn’t have to be on the front lines of its growth as a company. Which is useful. Imagine if I had bought one of these a few years ago, when the devices were less smart, when the tech was less sophisticated, when the bags were harder to get.
And finally, I am thrilled to report that the dog has correctly parsed each Roomba as his enemy. As one moves around the room, he walks behind it, sniffing, yawning, sometimes pawing. I wonder how many dogs my two Roombas will throw away over the next year.