Smile-breaks
I got a robot – or the robot got me?
A robot! I saw this one busily sweeping the floor at a friend's house—all by itself. I fell in love then and there.
I went on Amazon and bought one. After several frustrating days of trying to put it together, the robot spoke up: "Error 48. Cannot complete mission." Error 48, it turns out, stands for the dock part being unfixable. Return to sender.
I returned it and swore off robots. Until. . . weeks later a huge box showed up on my table, shadowed by a grinning, good-looking, son of my friend. A birthday gift from his mom who was at work. Thank you, Judy!
A month later I screwed up enough courage to take the parts out of the box. Days passed. Finally I started putting it together, a little every day. The robot has to be connected to WiFi and there's an app for your phone. There's a base to plug in—easy part!—with a ramp for the robot disc to get back in its dock between jobs. The robot disc is about the size of a 14" pizza but three or four inches deep. That's what does the vacuuming and/or mopping.
This particular robot is a NeverTouchPro. Remember that NeverTouch part. . .
I spent two days trying to put the mop cloth onto the bottom of the robot's disc. Nothing worked. "Leave me alone!" Oops! This is a NeverTouch robot. The—other—mop cloth was right where it was supposed to be all along. No need to touch anything. The mop cloth I was trying so hard to put on? It was an extra one.
I filled the water tank in the base and added the miracle solution that was supposed to keep my floors from ever getting dirty again. Kidding. Only for a week or so.
Voila! The robot is ready! I'll tell you, having a robot around to mop your floors is fantastic! The robot keeps me posted as it goes about its work. "My water tank is being filled," it sings out— after chiming a little melody, in case I wasn't paying attention.
Wait! What? I filled the water tank to the brim when I set up the robot. It's full. But you can't talk to a robot. You have to press on the app to tell it what to do. Conversations with a robot are one-sided. Like some. . . never mind. I'm not going there.
I found out later there's another water tank. It's inside the robot disc and that's what was being filled, with water from the larger tank in the base. There's a third tank in the base; the robot dumps the dirty water in that one, after mopping. NeverTouch, remember?
In the setup, the robot maps out the entire house and then on the app you choose which rooms you want mopped or vacuumed. Yesterday I told it to mop the wrong room. "Stop!" I yelled. It kept mopping, spreading water across the wrong floor. It didn't stop. Nothing stops a robot on a mission.
Nowhere on the app was there somewhere to press "stop" or "cancel." And you can't touch the robot to stop it—NeverTouch, remember?—so I got down on the floor where the robot was carefully wetting the wrong floor. Desperate, I pressed its buttons, all of three of them. Hard. One is for "home" and I don't remember what the other two are for. The robot kept mopping.
Only one possibility left. On the app, I pressed "Return to dock" and wow! The disc slowly turned and meandered back to its dock. "Ding, ding, ding." "Mission completed." From the dock it informed me, "Washing my pad." A few minutes later, "Starting to dry my pad."
For a robot, this thing sure talks a lot. Too bad I can't talk back.