This guy’s Roomba picked up his dog’s poop, and the results were horrifying

By Patrick Hogan  |  August 15, 2016 | 5:15pm
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Roombas are the little robots that clean up your house. Puppies are the little four-legged animals that destroy your house. If you thought that one might help take care of the other, you did not think this through.

Jesse Newton lives in Little Rock, Ark., with his wife, son and a year-old puppy named Evie. They also own a Roomba, which faithfully cleans their home every night while everyone is asleep. But one day last week, the puppy and the robot collaborated to create a a horror show in Newton’s house.

According to a detailed account Newton posted on his Facebook page, Evie must have defecated somewhere in the house between 12 and 1:30 AM. (He knows it had to have been in that time frame because the Roomba activates at 1:30 AM.)

The Roomba is designed to handle dust, dirt and other small detritus. Dog poop is a different story. Not only could it not pick up Evie’s present, it also did not even detect it. Instead, it plowed into it and then began spreading it across the house wherever it went.

Newton did not take any photos, for which we are grateful, but he did draw a diagram of the scene, which he said “resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.”

For comparison, here is what a Jackson Pollock painting looks like.

Here’s Newton’s full Facebook post about the incident. It’s long, but it’s worth a read if nothing else for the sense of mounting horror throughout


There was a mostly happy ending to the story. Newton was able to use a steam mop to clean up the mess, and said in his post that Hammacher Schlemmer replaced the Roomba, which did not survive his attempts to clean it. After his post began spreading around the Internet, multiple cleaning companies offered to come and take care of the mess for him.

Turns out the puppy and robot were on the side of the brands all along.

 
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