Talk about crappy luck. Arkansas Dad Jesse Newton took to Facebook on Tuesday, August 9, to describe what happened when the family’s Roomba — yes, a vacuum-cleaner robot — took on a fresh pile of dog poop.
The “poohpocalypse” survivor explained that, on August 1, the night in question, their puppy Evie did a No. 2 on the rug in the living room sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m., which is when the Roomba is set to clean.
“Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop … Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting,” warned the 34-year-old from Little Rock. “It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding — like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.”
Newton — who included a hilarious, hand-drawn diagram of the damage — went on to explain that he was alerted to the disaster when his 4-year-old son climbed into his bed at 3 a.m. “You’ll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you’ll walk into the living room. And you’ll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty,” he wrote. “And then the horror. Oh the horror.”
His next order of business: cleaning the $400 appliance. “You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece … By this point, the poop isn’t just on your hands — it’s smeared up to your elbows,” Newton shared. ‘Oh, and you’re not just using profanity — you’re inventing new types of profanity. You’re saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there’s no way he’s not ending up in prison.”
Though Newton’s wife, Kelly, lost her favorite rug to what he also dubbed “the Pooptastrophe,” there was light at the end of the tunnel. Hammacher Schlemmer — the well-known gadget company through whom Newton purchased the Roomba — replaced the machine at no cost and even tossed in a new chaise bed for the dog!
“I called them and told the truth,” Newton wrote. “My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.”
Newton’s post has received 172,000 likes and more than 317,000 shares.
The owner of Boutique Guitar Shop tells Us Weekly he and Kelly have been overwhelmed by the response. “We’re getting a free house cleaning!” Newton says.
He continued: “I’m very sorry I made so many people cry at work and spit various liquids out of their noses!”
