My vacuum is not this one. It is from a different company and this photo is just for demonstration purposes. Photo by Jens Mahnke on Pexels.com

The house has a robot vacuum.

It’s kinda new. It has been roaming the house at a pre-planned time for about three months now. Honestly, it’s nice to not have to sweep as often. It also cleans up some of the rugs that are by the entry points of the house, there there is that too.

But, it is also a lot like having a freaking toddler in the house.

Anything that is on the ground gets moved around and sometimes you have to go hunting for stuff. Example: shoes. It will push slippers and shoes under the furniture. Thus, I find myself on the floor trying to fish stuff out from under the bed or night stand. It will also sometimes grab shoe laces and drag the shoe around for a while.

It closes doors and gets stuck on the inside of a room. It keeps working, unlike a toddler, but then you have to open the door and direct it out of the room. So, now doors have to be closed when it starts so it doesn’t get stuck in room, just like you do when you have a toddler in the house and you don’t want them getting into stuff.

It gets stuck under things and doesn’t finish what it was doing. The TV stand. The coffee table. The night stand. If it gets caught on something, it just stops.

It unplugs stuff and then you wonder why it isn’t working. I have had the phone charging cable not power up my phone when I plug it in at night. The robot unplugged it from under the night stand. The subwoofer for the sound system wasn’t working and movies/tv sounded funny. The robot unplugged the subwoofer from the powerstrip under the TV stand. It once drug a phone cord all over the house.

It picks up stuff you really don’t want it to…like screws you accidentally drop or didn’t know came out of something. Fridge magnets. Hair ties. Batteries. It’s like a toddler that puts everything in its mouth and you’re running around saying, “What do you have in your mouth? Lemme see!”

Why does it treat somethings, like the wall and furniture, like it is glass and eases into cleaning the edges while at other times it just bashes it’s way around the same furniture, like it has no eyes and doesn’t have a clue that it is getting close to something? Same for a toddler and cats…you tell it to be careful and nice, gentle, and it does for a while and then all of the sudden it grabs a big handful of fur and pulls, sending the animal scurrying away.

I tell you, I don’t have time to babysit the robot.

Seriously.