Like many people, we have a roomba-type vacuum cleaner. We have named our roomba "Dobby" after the house elf in the Harry Potter books. If you are familiar with the Harry Potter story, you know that house elves like to work. Our Dobby, like any good house elf, vacuums our home and we assume he likes his job. Dobby however has a problem. Every so often, he loses his programming. When that happens, Dobby goes walk-about. That, in and of itself, does not pose a problem, but when an eerie blue light followed by jerky zig-zag movements and strange sweeping noises rolls into your bedroom in the middle of the night, it scares the dickens out of you. That has happened a couple of times and now we only use Dobby on manual mode.
An interesting thing happened 2 nights ago. When I got up I found one shoe in the middle of the bathroom. How did that happen? Neither of us could figure out how the shoe ///ended up about 10 feet from where it was supposed to be.
Today, we were out doing errands and arrived home at dinner time. As we were setting the table, I noticed that Dobby was not in his home base. Where was Dobby? Almost immediately, we found one of Dobby's brushes hiding by a door. We surmised that Dobby went walk-about until the battery died, so it would not do any good to push the "Home" button on his remote control which would activate Dobby to seek home base. We searched the easy hiding places all over the house to no avail, so we thought that Dobby had gotten lost under a piece of furniture. We looked under all the furniture and finally found him stuck under the sofa. Lucky for us, Dobby had turned himself off and the battery still had a charge. Once we un-stuck Dobby, the other DrC pushed the home button on the remote, and Dobby headed for his home base. Dobby is a "good house elf" after all.
Now for the question of the shoe? Did Dobby go walk-about the other night and move my shoe? It's possible, but we'll never know for sure.
PS. I have a friend who has a "Lost Roomba" somewhere in her 5000 square foot home. She and her kids have gone looking for it for several months now, and they have no idea where it went walk-about. Of course the battery is dead by now, so pushing the remote "home" button will not do any good.This roomba does not have a name.
PS2. I have another friend who lost the remote control for her roomba but that has not the stopped the programmed vacuum from doing it's chores. She says it decides when to clean and when to go home and they get out of the way when the roomba is doing its thing. BTW, the name of that roomba is Robby.
