Not sure what I’m going home to.

After agonising long and hard over the decision, RTH and I finally got round to buying one of these over the weekend.

If you aren’t 100% sure what it is, it’s a Roomba. An automatic vacuum. You schedule it and it goes off and does its own thing and cleans while you are at work.

Sounds great huh?

Well yeah, probably. I mean RTH and I don’t really have the time or the inclination to do much in the way of housework and we have hardwood floors that get very dusty and dirty, so why wouldn’t you go for this?

Well for one I’m a tiny bit opposed to having a semi-autonomous robot roaming around my home while I’m out.

I read enough Sci Fi to know that kind of situation never ends well for humanity. One minute it’ll be cleaning the floors, the next it’ll be colluding with the microwave to take over the world.

RTH still gives me funny looks when I mention this to him. My pointing out that it has full access to knives and liquor while we are out doesn’t seem to alarm him at all.

Initial testing over the weekend proved a little bit mixed. It generally does a good job on the bits it goes over. It doesn’t seem to get to every bit of the floor but I think the idea is that you schedule it every day and eventually the entire floor gets done.

It does get under the couch and the dining room table without too much difficulty but it did manage to shut itself in RTH’s bathroom the first time we let it loose.

Already though, I can see its personality breaking through. It managed to suck up a shoe lace, complete with shoe still attached and tried to drag that around for a while. When RTH came to the rescue and removed the offending shoe (plus lace) it, in RTH’s own words, “lunged straight for me”.

This’ll be the first day we’ve left the Roomba unattended. I’m usually the first one home. I’m dreading what I’ll find when I open that door!

I'm watching the local news with the expectation that the thing has escaped and is currently terrorizing the neighbourhood.

I'll let you know.......