That Horrible Moment The Roomba Vacuums Over The Dog Poop at 1:30 AM: 'The Poohpocalypse'
When you’re a parent, you learn to roll with the punches. Kids can get themselves into the craziest jams in no time flat, and you’re left just trying to pick up the pieces and retain some sense of dignity.
Puppies cause many of the same problems, and those who rush into getting a puppy because of the cuteness are often cautioned that getting one is like having another child: round-the-clock supervision and plenty of (often literally) sticky situations.
Being a parent is stressful — for these and other reasons — and there have been many inventions put on the market to assist over-worked, under-rested moms and dads.
One of these handy devices is a Roomba, a little vacuum cleaning robot that can be programmed to sweep and vacuum your entire house at whatever time is most convenient to you.
Most of the time Roombas are a luxury, and they’re left to work away on their own. Occasionally someone will get silly and post a video of a dog, cat, or baby going for a spin on top of one, but for the most part they get the job done on their own, and then go back to their spot and shut down. You’d never know they were hard at work except for the cleanliness they leave behind.
Unless you’re the unfortunate dad that this story centers on. In his case, Jesse Newton knew exactly where the Roomba had been and what it had been doing, and it wasn’t pretty — but the account he related through a Facebook post is absolutely side-splitting.
It all started in the wee hours of the morning, shortly after the parents had finally made it to bed. At 3 a.m., their son crawled into bed, and that’s when dad began to realize something had gone seriously wrong.
The post on Haslemere Rants starts off, “So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It’s taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror.”
“Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy Evie pooped on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she’s done this, so it’s probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night.”
Simple enough. Something all pet owners have dealt with at one point or another. But Newton’s case was special, because not only did he have a puppy, he had a Roomba.
“We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame? Why, friends, that’s because our Roomba runs at 1:30 a.m. every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.”
“Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle.”
“Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.”
If you have any imagination at all, you can probably visualize the scene. That industrious little cleaner working away, oblivious to the fact that it’s contaminating the entire house. But just in case, Newton makes it painfully clear with his lengthy descriptions.
“It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house.”
“Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding – like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.”
Of course, then what happened was their son got up, unknowingly tracked through the poop trails, and tried to snuggle up with mom and dad. But the overwhelming stench got dad up and running — to the tub. But first, he had to witness the horror.
“And you’ll walk into the living room. And you’ll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you’ll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything’s okay.”
The tale isn’t over yet, though. Newton details the entire adventure, from washing his son’s feet to trying to clean the Roomba and accidentally frying it by throwing it into the tub. He decided to get to work and clean up the mess, and it took him a good couple of hours.
“Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she’ll ask if you tried to clean it first.”
The moral of the story is incredibly clear. If you have a Roomba and a dog, never let this happen, or you’ll have an apoocalypse of your own to deal with!
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