Dust Happens

Not even a robot can change a lifetime of habits

Housekeeping is not a major issue in our home. Measured scientifically, Stalwart Rob and I are both pretty tidy. Our individual baseline messiness is quite low, and our relative messiness one to the other is safely within the guidelines specified by the United Nations Convention on Household Chores, Subsection II, Chapter 17: “If You Don’t Want To Find That Under Your Pillow, You’d Better Clean It Up Right Now.”

So we’re all right, really. Or so I thought.

Something fundamental has changed in our lifestyle. For 10 years, I moved house every year whether I needed to or not. Sometimes twice. My massive forward momentum caught up even Stalwart Rob, whose “nurture first, ask questions later” principle was helpless to defy it. Like the engine on an old car, I will overheat if I don’t keep going forward. But three years have now passed and we’re still in the same place, and thus are the flaws in our housekeeping revealed.

Now we see what happens if we don’t pack everything up on a routine basis and put it someplace new. Dust happens.

My solution to this goes back to the excellent advice given by to us by Rob’s mum, a wise woman and Earth Mother-in-law. Stalwart Rob and I work an eye-watering number of hours in a week, plus or minus a major deadline or a project catastrophe. Stalwart Rob does it because he’s intensely loyal and feels tremendous responsibility; I do it because if I don’t keep my brain busy, it wanders off to find its own fun. We need to trim down our lives, to do less, to make more time. She suggested we hire some help to lessen our obligations. So we bought a robot.

This was not what she had in mind.

It was my idea to buy this robot, which would no doubt startle our friends to hear. Because, you see, I am a simple solutions kind of person. I will attempt to solve any problem by nailing two two-by-fours together; Stalwart Rob, however, has two science degrees. He will attempt to solve any problem by building a particle accelerator. Unlikely as it seems, it really is my robot, and where it is concerned I am not operating from a place of simplicity, or of solutions, or even of rationality.

I love my robot. If it had arms, I’d be knitting it a little sweater even as we speak.

Our mechanical housemate is a little cordless vacuum cleaner that selflessly cleans the floor so that we don’t have to. Or so the brochure said. In practice, the robot wanders around the room in drunken circles trying to figure out where the furniture is, and does a little light sucking in between. So while its vacuuming prowess isn’t exactly off the charts, I have to feel affection for anything that experiences its world entirely by bumping into stuff. I listen to it bouncing off the legs of the dining table and I’m rooting for it.

I want so badly for it to succeed. For all of us.

We have not, however, succeeded in solving the problem. (Which was dust, if you’ve lost track.) I’ve knocked “Sweeping and Vacuuming” off the to-do list, but have filled up the hole in the schedule with a new obligation. You see, far from enhancing my ability to multi-task, technology has instead required me to hang around on high alert for an hour, waiting for the Little Vacuum Cleaner That Couldn’t Quite to get stuck someplace and cry for help. Which it does, often, the confused and anxious squeal of a tiny electronic brain in distress. And help it I do, because I want my robot to be happy. I need my robot to be happy. As far as the quality of my domestic entertainment goes, I am in ridiculous obsession heaven, but the house is still filling up with dust: slowly, inevitably, tidally.

So we hired a cleaning lady. A pair of them, in fact, who turned up, surveyed the premises and offered to make our bed for us.

At this point, we evacuated the area.

I set the bar for feeling like a soulless member of the social elite very high a couple of years ago by accidentally knocking a homeless man off a bicycle with the door of my car. But this new experience—shutting the door behind my cleaning ladies and then going for lunch—must rank in the top five. My working-class roots, ever so humble, have grown me up to the point where I am subcontracting out the making of my bed. I’m really not certain how it happened.

There is nothing that my forebears weren’t willing to try their hands at, with varying levels of success, for the sake of self-reliance. You know how, when you’re a small child, you think your father knows how to do everything? I have observed mine for many years, and I’m prepared to conclude that he actually still does. Saint Dad has, at some point in his life, done everything for himself at least once, and he hovers somewhere between amused and horrified by how quick I am to pay people to do stuff for me. There are many of landmines buried in the immigrant experience: the loss of ancestral language, the fracturing of extended families, the decline of traditional trades. Bequeathing to one’s daughter the gift of a prosperous new country and watching her grow up to be a useless Latte Yuppie is an outcome that few would foresee.

I am, however, unapologetic on the subject of my cleaning ladies. They are professionals. They don’t squeal if they get stuck on the edge of the carpet. They actually care about my dust bunnies in a way I never could. And they’re cheaper than moving house.

I wonder if I can get my robot on a waiting list for daycare? M

Giulia Mauro is a writer and robot fancier who also experiences the world entirely by bumping into things.