Dave Brown

Lurching into the future

We determined that we needed to get a vacuum cleaner, so we went shopping for one the other day.

Did you know that vacuum cleaners have all of a sudden gotten really expensive? It used to be that you could get a really good vacuum cleaner for an ichiman or so (about a hundred dollars, for people in Foreign)—but the current crop of vacuum cleaners can be gotten for somewhere north of five hundred bucks. For that kind of price, I’d expect the thing to do its own damn vacuuming!

So we got a Roomba, which for the introductory model these days, costs somewhat less than ¥50,000—but which does, in fact, do its own damn vacuuming.

It’s really cute! It bumbles around just like a sort of drunken cat, in its efforts to cover the entire apartment. But it does have its downsides.

It really is happiest when you have a tidy apartment for it to run around in. That’s a bit of a problem for a geek like me, who has wires trailing around all over the place. It’s already proven its prowess at emulating a real human janitor, by tripping over the router’s power cable and disconnecting me from the Internet. It also tends to get tangled in the curtains—although to its credit, it seems to realize that this has happened, and backs away quite gracefully.

It’s surprisingly good at navigating its way around obstacles—for instance, it cheerfully clambered up onto the quite-thick living-room rug we have and did quite a thorough job of cleaning it, even though it has a coffee table and an end table on it.

A lovely benefit of having a vacuum cleaner that’s self-propelled and is only four inches high, though, is that it can cheerfully go under things. It did a great job of clearing out the dust from underneath the sofa and the TV stand, places which would generally go unvacuumed by normal people. And it’s still good fun to watch.

When we get sufficiently-organized, with any luck, I’ll be able to just hit “go!” on the thing in the morning and then head off to work, and come back to find a robot in some place for me to trip over—but a clean apartment. We determined that the price boost for getting a robot that could find its own charging stand was a bit high—and the price boost for getting a robot with scheduling was just plain excessive.

So far: two thumbs up!

Also, it’s fun when it gets stuck somewhere—it stops, beeps mournfully, and says, “I’m stuck! Please move me to somewhere else and press the CLEAN button again.”