Domo arigato, Mr Roboto

Last year my husband tried to talk me into the Roomba. (For those of you Flintstones out there, the Roomba is a vacuum cleaning robot.)

For the first few years of our marriage, frequency of house cleaning was a cause of much marital conflict. Eric and I have different lengths of time that we can go before cleaning. I actually like to wait until things look pretty dirty, because then when I clean, I get a real sense of satisfaction. Eric would prefer that things were cleaned preventatively. We've pretty much come to a good compromise over the years as it relates to frequency of cleaning, but Eric had a "great idea" last year.

In Eric's dream world, we'd have "people" for everything. People to clean, people to cook, people to do repairs and general yard work, etc. He would love to have people....People.....people who need people.................

But in lieu of being able to afford people, he decided that the Roomba was our answer. The Roomba can be programmed to vacuum your house whenever you want it to. You can program it to come out when you go to bed, and you will wake up to clean floors. There is also a hard floor option, the Scooba, which works the same way.

Eric explained the wonders of the Roomba to me. You put the Roomba's base under a couch or something, and you can program it to wake up whenever you want it to, when you're asleep, when you're out of the house, on vacation. The Roomba navigates a room on it's own, avoiding the furniture. It knows when it's about to fall down the stairs, and stops. It knows when it's battery is about to die, and it returns to it's base on it's own.

As I was listening to Eric describe the Roomba, my mind started taking me on a strange journey...I was envisioning going to bed at night, and this little robot coming out from under the couch and moving slowly around the floors of my house. A robot that "knows" things....I started thinking "what if it can also LEARN things"...if it knows that it's about to fall DOWN the stairs, how long would it take for it to figure out how to CLIMB stairs and figure out where I'm sleeping? I wondered if I'd even be able to sleep at night, knowing this little robot that "knows" things was roaming my house. Wondering if the Roomba was trying to get into the kids' rooms..

Then my mind moved to a Gremlin theory, wondering if the little Roomba accidentally knocked over a glass of water on itself, would it morph into TWO Roombas?? Would I wake up one morning to thousands of Roombas rolling around my bedroom floor, just waiting for me to stick my little toe out of bed so they could vacuum it up?!??!??! DON'T BUY THE ROOMBA!!!!

Even though I am an intelligent 34 year old woman, this is where my mind went. Though I knew they were ridiculous, I had a hard time stopping my brain from thinking these thoughts. Imagination can be paralyzing...



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