The Death of Jerry

It doesn't matter if you're a renter or owner, your place will eventually start filling up with stuff. Useful stuff. And other stuff. That stuff can be piles of crowdfunded board games you've told yourself you'll get around to playing eventually, and it can be tools and devices that have become part of the way you maintain the space that you're living in.

There are times when you know something is important to the daily ecosystem, and times where that does not become apparent until that "something" is removed and you're forced to figure out another path.

This week, Patrick is dealing with—wait for it—the loss of a cleaning robot. And has you might have guessed, his name is...was...Jerry.

Patrick: I come to you with some grave news, Rob. Over the weekend, my family confronted the death of our beloved cleaning robot named Jerry. He could dust. He could map. Tragically, he was only a little over one year old. But sometimes, Rob, your time is your time, you know?

In reality, I finally won an ongoing customer service skirmish I’ve had with Eufy for the past year. “Skirmish” is perhaps an aggressive way to describe “sending an angry customer service email twice over the past year,” but the company finally agreed to send me a replacement unit. 

See, Jerry is very good at mopping. But over time, his mopping was getting louder and louder. It wasn’t always loud—just sometimes. The moment you’d take your phone out to capture that noise—a noise that can only be described as grind-like—it would disappear. It would disappear long enough that Jerry would go back to doing a good job of cleaning up dust, dirt, and crumbs, and you’d forget there were times where it sounded like Jerry was loudly chewing the floor.

(It was never leaving any marks; I suspect it’s an issue of the mops not being wet enough.)

The first time, Eufy customer service told me it’d send a beta firmware to the device. It worked, I think? Or, at least, I told myself it was working and went back to ignoring the one-in-five times it would map and make that noise? And then, a few weeks back, I’d had enough. The noise was enough that my wife commented on it, so I proceeded to lay down on the floor, like a nature photographer waiting, hoping the noise would appear. Minutes go by—nothing. Just a buzz.

Then, it happened. The noise. I whipped my phone out, nabbed a solid 30 seconds of the mind-numbing shriek, and proceeded to send a new notice to Eufy customer service, this time telling them I would also write a negative review on the marketplace where I purchased it!!!!!

24 hours later, they agreed it was a problem and offered to replace the whole thing. Hooray!

Except, this is why I’m writing to you. We’ve had some version of a cleaning robot for many, many years. And it turns out we’ve become increasingly reliant on that device taking care of the day-to-day cleaning. You get used to a little more dirt, a few more crumbs when you can just tap a button and watch them all disappear. But now, it looks like it’ll be at least a week or more before the replacement shows up, a replacement that Eufy won’t send until they receive the first device. Until then, I’m stuck searching for where our mop went. Hey, where did that broom go?

What I mean to say is that it’s funny to see how reliant and intertwined the view of our family room—the main room that needs daily cleaning—was tied up with these devices. Now, I’m looking at a decent amount of extra chores to keep the status quo. I want my robot back, Rob!

Rob: MK and I are very close to turning against the robots, Patrick. In fact, it may have already happened.

We have an iRobot Roomba named Linguini. We named him that before we realized how apt it would prove to be: Linguini is hopelessly incompetent. iRobot talks a good game about how their robots can map your home and use that information to navigate but I'll be damned if this little bastard doesn't get himself trapped in the bathroom every other night, or beaches himself on the little rubber tray we use for the dog dishes. It never moves, it's the same place every night. Doesn't matter. Linguini gets stuck on the lip, runs his wheels until his battery dies, and then we come collect him in the morning and put him on his charger.

On the rare nights he doesn't shut a door on himself or get stuck on things? Well, he takes forever to vacuum upstairs. So long, in fact, that we will bolt awake at four in the morning because somehow he is still going and also because he is smashing into our dining room chairs on the floor over our bed, or clattering along the baseboard heaters. It sounds like someone is vandalizing your house! Then you realize it's the robot, breathe a sight of relief, and try to go back to sleep. Just as you are drifting off, he'll Mister Magoo his way back to his base station and unload into the bag, making a sound like an air raid siren.