Boys vs the Roomba

We've bought a Roomba - which, if you're not up on household technology, is a robot vacuum cleaner. It's battery powered, and it doesn't suck enormously hard, but what it lacks in power it makes up for with persistence.

You put it in a room, and it vacuums it. It starts off going in an increasing spiral, until it hits something, and then it gets a bit random where it goes. But it just keeps vacuuming until it's battery runs out. Then it sits on its charger for an hour, and it's ready to go again (if it's near enough to its charger when the battery runs out, it makes its own way to it, and sits on it. Usually it's not in the same room that it started in though.)

So, we have the boys (and possibly me) constantly scattering crumbs on the floor, and the Roomba constantly (well, almost constantly) scuttling about picking them up. The boys call all vacuum cleaners Nu-Nus (from the somewhat maternal vacuum cleaner on the Teletubbies) but this does seem especially like the Nu-Nu. First, because it follows you around, cleaning up (today I chopped onions in the kitchen, and didn't worry about the little bits falling on the floor - I'll just drop the NuNu in there later), second because of it's fidgety manner. It goes forward until it hit something, and then it turns a little, to try to get around it, goes forwards again, and so on.

Because we splashed out on a slightly more expensive version, it's got a remote control, so rather than letting it wander on its own, one can steer it. D and A have a number of remote control cars (it's the law that children have a number of remote control cars, because they are so cheap. When I was their age, I would have killed for a remote control car), but they have spent more time steering the NuNu around things, than they have with all of their cars combined.

The other weird thing about it is how much one anthropomorphises it - well, maybe not anthropo, maybe zoomorphises ... maybe I should stop trying to use clever words that might not even exist ... how much one thinks of it as an animal. It misbehaves, because I set it cleaning one room, but forget to close the door, and when I come back it's gone. Like a naughty little thing that has escaped, it's away cleaning the bathroom or the bedroom instead of the hallway (it's supposed to be doing our bedroom at the moment, but I suspect it's in the living room instead).

It also gets trapped - once it gets behind the dining table, or into the bathroom, it has enormous trouble getting out again. There's quite a small target it needs to hit to get out through the door, and when it fails, it turns too far and gets in again. I feel sorry for it, and like I should rescue it.