Miracle of Technology, the Robot Vacuum

 

Last week I was perusing the many black Friday deals that we are bombarded with during the season of giving when I came across an advertisement for a robot vacuum cleaner at the bargain basement price of four hundred dollars. According to the ad, I would be saving $150 which as far as I can tell is better than I could get at Walmart, the big box superstore which follows the business model of decimating all the mom and pop shops on Main Street of every town in the country.

We could collectively shun Walmart and put them out of business for paying their workers peanuts while offering a benefits package that consists of directions on how to file for food stamps if it wasn't for the everyday fantastic deals we all enjoy from shopping there. I rarely go to Walmart because I hate the layout of the store. I think they randomize the placement of merchandise to promote impulse buying. The last time I went into a Walmart, I wandered about among the bounty looking for men's underwear which I eventually found next to some motor oil.

My wife, Christine, has been complaining about the dust in our house. For two years, we had a cleaning person who did a fantastic job. Christine recently let them go because as she put it,

"They keep breaking stuff."

Being a little too rough on our trinkets and baubles was not a good idea. The worst part was that they never told us when they broke something. They would just leave the newly freed up piece next to the thing they just ruined. The last straw was when Christine discovered the ear to a limited edition, Kaiser porcelain horse statue lying next to the wooden base. We bought the statue in a small town in England on our honeymoon so it was kind of special to both of us. The good news is it's free of dust. The bad news is that our limited edition Kaiser porcelain horse statue now qualifies for a black Friday mega deal.

My wife and I both try very hard to keep up with the housework, but I'm not nearly as good with that kind of thing as I am with fixing stuff. While I will gladly glue the ear back on the horse, I loath vacuum cleaning. So that got me thinking that technology should be able to remedy this problem in the form of a robot. After all, that's what robots are for, you know, to do all the things no one else wants to do. Best I can tell, a robot vacuum can't do the steps nor the lampshades, but everything else is covered.

Now, I watched a lot of movies and shows that feature robots, and what I learned is they'll be able to clean my house better than a human. When I was a kid I watched Westworld in 1973. Sure things went amiss with the robots going haywire and bumping off a bunch of peeps, but that was then. Technology has come a long way. More recently the AMC series, Humans, featured robots that were consciously connected via a centralized server, but for some reason they had to plug in and charge every night. In the future, wireless communication is going to link up millions of entities, but the state of batteries will pretty much remain at the level of today's smart phones. In 1975, I watched the movie, The Stepford Wives, which feature a town in Connecticut replacing women with homely dressed, obedient robots. I also saw Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine in reruns. The movie starred Vincent Price as a mad scientist who made sexy women robots that committed bank robberies. 

Gemma Chan

What all these shows have in common is that men eventually boff the robots. In Humans, Anita played by Gemma Chan is purchased as a domestic servant. By the fourth episode of the first season, Joe, whose idea it was to purchase a robot in the first place, discovers in the owner's manual that Anita has an adult option that can be activated by scratching off a code in the manual then reciting it while being in contact with her. Now, mind you, this is not why I want a robot vacuum. It's more to combat my allergies. Besides, I would never pick an attractive female robot if I were to get one. Just look at all the Hollywood power couples broken up by babysitters. I can see how that happens with all these celebrities except for Arnold Schwarzenegger and his maid.

 

I have a friend who has a robot vacuum. He posts pictures of his cat riding it all the time. I think this is great because it allows his cat to shed in places it normally wouldn't go. He told me that his robot vacuum occasionally breaks down or gets stuck in odd places. Once it got jammed up on a hairball which is a euphemism for cat puke.

"Yeah, but does it work?" I asked.

"When it runs, it works fine," he said.

He's not fooling me for a minute. I know what's going on here. I've heard of this before. Those things were not designed for that. You should never let your cat ride the vacuum cleaning robot.