Old tech and new (part 2)

PART 2: NEW TECH (old tech is here)

here may have been a time when a vacuum cleaner was an acceptable gift for a husband to give his wife. Perhaps this was during the post-WW2 “golden age of capitalism”. All sorts of so-called energy-saving devices were making their way to the mass market, and the novelty of new gadgetry might have outweighed the implication that a wife’s biggest Christmas wish was to vacuum the house. At least, that’s what ads from the time try to tell us.

But by the time this husband was buying presents for his wife, such gifts would be looked upon as evidence that (a) you were a male chauvinist pig who thought the woman’s place was in the home, and (b) you thought she would be happy to be viewed as your domestic servant. No thank you ma’am!

Times and sensibilities continue to evolve, though. Kathleen and I do a pretty good job of sharing cleaning chores, and we are both annoyed by the pet hair and 75 years of unidentifiable dust that seems to rain down continuously inside our house. (Kathleen is annoyed because of her fastidious sensibilities; I am annoyed because of my allergies). So I figured, correctly, that any gift that reduced that problem would be most welcome.

So I got Kathleen an Autonomous Floor Suctioning Vehicle (AFSV) for the house, to regularly give our floors the once-over and keep the dust and hair from proliferating too badly.

It’s a Roomba, of course. Kathleen wasn’t insulted at all to get one for a present, but she was skeptical that it’d work. “We’ll have to be constantly rearranging the furniture to get out of its way, and it’ll be more work than just vacuuming ourselves!” But I said that a Roomba can navigate just fine around furniture, and we should at least give a chance before we send it back.

So we set it up. In an obvious effort to get you to anthropomorphize the thing, when you initialize it, it records that date as its “birthday”, and asks you to give it a name. We decided on the obvious—Kathleen Junior. 

And the thing works like a champ. As long as it avoids a couple of key areas where the carpet is too thin to bump against and too thick to just drive over, it operates just fine. I don’t know exactly how it finds its way around without any seeing or (I’m told) internal map-memorizing functions, but it does. The search algorithm it uses seems to allow it, eventually, to wander into each room on the first floor and suck up all the dust, even along the walls.

Mostly we tell it to vacuum in the wee hours long after we’ve gone upstairs to bed (like 8 PM). But sometimes I like to start it up just to watch it work, helping it out of tough spots, or nudging it with my foot to encourage it into a room or an area I want it to pay special attention to. When I seem to be getting too solicitous, Kathleen pouts, “You love Kathleen Junior more than you love me”.

“That’s not true, honey”, I reassure her, “I love you both EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT”.

Thanks,
Dorn
11/11/2020