Day 58: welcoming our new robotic overlords

[freckles_and_doubt]

OMG my HOUSE is CLEAN! because Codsworth arrived yesterday, and was absurdly simple to set up, and spent three hours last night bumbling around the house picking up three of his dustbin's worth of cat hair, kitty litter, dust, random cat food bits and dead beetles, which are apparently the result of my clearly rather incompetent and perfunctory cleaning routine. Some interesting pointers have emerged.

• Apparently my COVID fogged-spectacles grocery-store special of accidentally buying the object two to the right of the one I actually want, extends for no adequately defined reason to online shopping. I blame the multiple open tabs of exhaustive research. Having negotiated cost analyses, comparisons, endless reviews and the weird availability sine waves of robotic vacuum cleaners under the effects of South Africa's frantic middle classes forced, for the first time ever, to clean their own houses for extended periods, I placed the order for what turned out to be a Milex Intellivac rather than the Xiaomi Mi I had selected and fondly imagined I'd clicked on. They are both white, approximately the same price and have similar levels of good review, which is clearly why I confused open tabs, so we'll have to see how it turns out.
  
• The main irritation of the above is that all the online hacking instructions for replacing the robot voice are for Roombas or the Mi, and the annoying lady who says "Cleaning initiated!" and for some reason I persist in identifying as Japanese-American, is really a bad match with the Codsworth persona. But the name has stuck. (Codsworth, as I mentioned in the comments on my last post, is the robotic butler companion from Fallout 4, and is rather excessively British).
  
• I am completely charmed by the extent to which the self-propelled nature of the robot confers agency and personality on it. Codsworth bumbles happily around my house, bumping gently into things and doing a sort of spin reversal with what I cannot help but read as a certain amount of muttering under his breath. He inches carefully along walls with little spinny motions to get into corners, and when presented with an open space, marches carefully across it in rows, with little officious semi-military turns. He's very good at getting under things like cupboards and the piano stool, and extricating himself by judicious spinning: he spent twenty minutes footling happily around under my bed, removing possibly an entire cat's worth of cat hair. When faced with the living room rug, which has a tendency to runkle, he goes at it manfully and usually manages to climb the bumps. He is usually either tired or drunk by the time he's finished, and takes several goes, entailing backing up about a metre, to align himself with his docking station. He is a Personality, and I am happy to have him added to the household.
  
• Robot-proofing the household is a bit like child-proofing, at floor level. The place is ridiculously tidy because I've had to put away anything he could choke on or knock over. In related news, apparently I own seventeen cat toys.
  
• The cats' responses to him are endlessly funny. Jyn is freaked: she clearly reads the little darts he does as attacks, and watches him cautiously from a safe distance, poised to flee, her eyes like saucers. Pandora, on the other hand, is not only unphased, she identifies him as a fellow creature who needs to be firmly placed into the pecking order, which means her current favourite party trick is to sit her substantial bulk down in front of him with some deliberation, and refuse to move while glaring at him, so he has to bump her and go round. She doesn't seem to mind this, and doesn't actually hiss or spit at him, which means the "fellow creature" routine is only partially initiated, and he's clearly not a fellow cat. I am taking mental bets with myself on how long it'll take her to work out he doesn't give a fuck for her status.
  
• Fallout's Codsworth is a round, floating robot with multiple arms; in game you can stick a bowler hat on him. I am lamenting the absence in my life of a miniature bowler hat I can affix to him. However, it occurs to me that I do have a spare Colmant champagne cap, which is in the shape of a miniature top hat. BRB, need to find the double-sided tape...

Comments

[caprices]

Codsworth is an EXCELLENT name for a spinny, self-determined cleaning discus.

[freckles_and_doubt]

it has a certain pleasing inevitability, I think! and conforms to the general unspoken rule that all pets have to be named in accordance with my high levels of fangirlyness.