Quarantine Quandary: Roomba And Bored

In this time of universal social distancing many of us are facing anxiety, fear, trepidation. Forced to sit around the house and avoid face-to-face contact with others, some are also encountering extreme boredom. But not Kathi and me.

For instance, this Saturday morning we spent a full hour following the peregrinations of Sir Sucks-a-Lot. That’s our new robot vacuum. We named him Sir Sucks-a-Lot because he seems to us to evince a … well, not a soul exactly … but at least a persona.

If you watch him carefully, you’ll notice that he has clear, humanlike disdain for our two black labs. He goes after them. Deliberately. They can’t nap while he’s up and at it. He smashes right into them; they scurry off as if being threatened by a hissing, canine-averse Siamese cat.

They – Molly and Zoey – will tell you Sucks-a-Lot is a live, menacing creature. They know. You pet owners know how an older, singlepet dog reacts when you bring a new, exuberant puppy into the family? “What the heck is this? Why have you brought this crazed animal into the house – this frenetic thing that is obsessed with biting me by the neck? And eating … no, woofing down … my food? My food!” Well that’s exactly how they react to Sir S.

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