little Roomba really sucks (it’s a good thing)

Mark & Becky recently brought over their Roomba to give it a whirl on our cut-berber carpetting to see how it handled under… er, over… our conditions. A picture says a thousand words, so here are three:

We were amazed that it picked up that much cat hair in only 5 minutes (the battery had not received a full charge before working for us) and that it even picked up the feathers from our down-filled nine-foot-long couch. Samba pulls the feathers out of the pillows, but she doesn’t know how to throw them away in a trash can yet.

Before you start thinking that David and I live like slobs, I would have you know that the carpet that the Roomba traversed was vacuumed by our Kirby G5 just seven days prior to the Roomba visit. Cats shed. a lot.

The cats, our two cats, were curious. They’re pretty accepting of things, though, and they’re also just big kittens, being about 2 years old and not set-in-their-ways quite yet. Mambo is more laid back… he’s the kind of cat you’d see sitting on a lawn chair out on his balcony with a beer (or Dr. Pepper for you Baylor alumni) and his feet propped up on a cooler… and he was like, “Hey can I smell it? Why is it coming close to me, I guess I should move. It’s getting closer. I need to move.” then zoom, and start over from the smell it part. Samba is more freakish and she was just a quivering cowering pile of fur with two huge Oh-My-God-What-Is-That-Thing-and-why-is-it-moving eyes popping out of her head. Samba, being the hisser, didn’t hiss at it, but she doesn’t hiss at our regular vacuum either. She only hisses when you pull something like a tail or a paw or a ear. Hiss on command, but we never hurt her. She’s the drama queen. Mark’s cats just find another room to chill in until it dies.