I am a self-professed clean freak; one of those people who can’t study in a room that’s not tidy, gets intense urges to organize mess and has been known to vacuum the living room at 12 am on a Tuesday. And what bothered me most about that situation was not that I was vacuuming that late at night but that the damn vacuum cleaner didn’t pick up anything. My mom and I bought the offending machine from Target when she and my Dad helped me move in this year. It’s an upright DirtDevil and the box promised that this “power stick” would clean up anything my carpet could throw at it with its 12 amps. It lied. It takes half an hour to vacuum a 12 by 16 foot room. After I’ve gone over the same patch of carpet for the fifth time, I’m usually sweating profusely.
Because graduation is around the corner and my housemates love me in spite of (or maybe because of) my anal retentive streak, they looked up roombas online to get me for a present. The idea has apparently been nixed because the units are pretty expensive, but the search sparked my interest. I did a little online searching to find out more about the product, made by iRobot. The wikipedia site offers a general overview of the roomba. The spherical units look like something from “The Jettsons.” The appear to hover over the floor, detect walls or furniture with infrared sensors and even have an internal timing system so that you can set it to vacuum your floors while you are at work. I don’t really see a down side to this, I mean, it’s a completely guilt free use of technology. I don’t really like cleaning or spending my time cleaning, I just like the end result so the roomba is basically a dream come true. Although I am skeptical about it’s effectiveness (does it do corners? how does it know if it’s gotten everything in an area?) I would definitely buy something like this after I’d tested it out.
