I don’t much like cleaning house, but I like my house when it’s clean.  To this end we bought a Roomba, one of those little robot vacuum cleaners.  Found a smashing deal on a refurb.

Bob set it up to go off by itself at 2:00 p.m. so it would work while we were gone.  He was going to work late so he sent me an e-mail asking me to look for it when I got home – to make sure that it got back to it’s little recharging base successfully.

Well, the first thing I did when I got home was look at the base.  No Roomba.

I walked around, noting the dog and cat hair drifting at my feet, like it was when I left.  I started looking for the Roomba in earnest, checking obscure corners and under furniture.  I looked in every room in the house, albeit cursorily.  I wasn’t making it my life’s work, but I checked every room.  No Roomba.

I called Bob and told him the vacuum was nowhere to be found.  He said, “Was the front door open?  Maybe it snuck out.”  Ha ha.

No.  Bob came home and looked around for it, too, later that same evening.   No Roomba.

We forgot about it for a couple of days, and then Bob went on a hands-and-knees tour of the house look for the Roomba.  He found the little rascal in the front bedroom in the folds of the bedskirt.  It had tried to vacuum up a sock and choked, and, apparently ashamed of itself went into hiding.  The battery wasn’t dead, it was just unconscious.  We dislodged the sock, hit the power, and it started right up.

Anyway, we learned that you can’t leave anything on the floor.  And that maybe we’ll just  have the Roomba do the front half of the house.  Not so many square feet to search.