We officially entered the Jetson’s age this week with the purchase of a robot vacuum. Congratulations to Roomba for becoming a generic trademark, by the way, because every time I’ve used the phrase “robot vacuum” in explaining our post-modern status, the response has been, “You mean a Roomba?” Well, yes. And no. Ours is a Shark.
In setting up the app that communicates with the vacuum, it asks for the vacuum’s name. It being a Shark, we quickly landed on the name “Jamie Tartt” (doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo), after the character in Ted Lasso whose personal anthem shares a melody with the once-ubiquitous “Baby Shark.”
It took all of one cleaning for us to fall in love. It’s been a week and now we’re devotees.
One dog, two cats, two people, and a gravel road make for a whole lotta hair and dust rolling around on our wood floors. We’ve never been able to stay on top of it, and had simply grown accustomed to having hairy dust bunnies lurking in every corner. Bunnies being bunnies, they seemed to multiply faster than we could keep up. Immediately after sweeping and vacuuming, we’d find more dust bunnies.
“Hey honey, guess what? I found another orphan kitten!”
“No way!”
I’d heard other vets wax rhapsodic about the life-changing magic of a robot vacuum in a home full of pets, but I didn’t quite believe the hype. Why spend a few hundred bucks on a gadget that does the same thing as the vacuum I already own? So wasteful.
Oh, how wrong I was.
After one go, Jamie Tartt had our floors cleaner than they’d ever been. The rugs looked nicer than if we’d vacuumed them ourselves. The floors felt better under bare feet than they did after we mopped. The dog even started slipping more, due to the lack of dirt for traction. Yikes.
In seeing how shiny the floor was, with nary a dust bunny in sight, we were a little shocked by how much dirt and hair we’d come to accept as the inevitable price of pet ownership. We were also shocked by how much more relaxed we felt at seeing clean floors in every direction. And we were gobsmacked by the amount of hair Jamie Tartt picked up, and continues to pick up every day. No wonder we couldn’t stay on top of it.
Jamie is not without other charms, besides his excellent cleaning skills. Yes, I just gendered my vacuum. I find it hilarious that once he took the name “Jamie Tartt,” we started referring to him using male pronouns. Never “it.” After noticing this, I wondered briefly if that was how God became male. Call somebody “Jehovah” once and you can’t help but use male pronouns after that.
For a vacuum, Jamie Tartt is a pretty quiet houseguest. There’s a minor jet engine sort of noise when the docking station is sucking the collected gunk out of the robot, and there’s a chime when he starts up, but during operation, he’s about as loud as a tabletop fan. Which is to say, background noise.
Everyone in the house is mesmerized by watching Jamie clean. The dog learned to hate vacuums from our previous cat, who ran away in terror every time we switched one on. Jamie Tartt’s first outing aroused quite a bit of suspicion, but after he bumped into one of her tennis balls and sent it rolling, he’s a curiosity.
Our younger cat is somewhat oblivious to anyone else’s personal space, so he seems a bit befuddled at this newcomer who doesn’t respect his own personal space at all. He also enjoys batting at the sweeping brushes on Jamie’s forward edge.
The humans enjoy watching Jamie make his neat little rows, and when he manages to escape from under the desk, or free himself from the tendrils of carpet that dangle from the cat tree, or clean under the couch, we say, “Good job, Jamie Tartt!” And when he heads back to his dock after a hard half-hour of cleaning, we say, “What a good boy, Jamie Tartt!”
Look, I can’t defend it. It just comes out. And he is a good boy.
Why didn’t we get him sooner?
