The time my dog defiled my sensei's roomba

The unfortunate series of events that led to a horrifying technological experience.

The shameless culprit

The Setup

Your typical authority figure or teacher can be intimidating to hang out around outside of your usual interaction locations. Luckily for me, this wasn't the case for my Sensei and I, as it was and is my father. However, this particular situation wasn't made any better by the fact that we are family. During Karate classes growing up, I was always pushed a little bit harder than the rest (Especially in sparring class). Which was fine by me, I’ve always enjoyed being under a bit more pressure than others. It wasn’t often that I got a win over my Father and Sensei…but on this Christmas vacation though, I would be doing the damage!

My father had just gotten a brand new Roomba as a gift. If you're not familiar with what that is, its essentially an automated vacuum that travels across the floor and cleans up while your gone. I had brought my dog on this vacation to play with my dads dog, “Kempo.” We decided to go to the mall one day, which is about 2 hours away from his house. My ever-wise Sensei (Father) convinced me that I could leave my dog out of the cage (which I usually don’t do) while we were gone. By him saying that, I assumed that he had turned the Roomba off…

The Realization

We had a fun day with some family, and we were heading home after about 3 hours and had a conversation in the car ride home that went something a little like this.

-Sensei: “Your dog better not have pooped on my floor…”

-Me: “Oh, she probably did. But it's fine, I will clean it up.”

-Sensei: “What?? I thought you said she would be fine?!”

-Me: “She will, she won't chew on anything. She just usually stays in her crate whenever she is alone this long. She did most likely poop though”

-Sensei: “…I don’t know if I turned the Roomba off.”

-Me: “…”

…Whoops

The Horror

For the rest of the car ride, all 6 of the passengers were in complete terror of what we would come home to. Needless to say I wouldn’t be writing this article if everything turned out okay.. Like I said before, luckily for me, my father and I have a good relationship. The situation wasn't as bad as it could have been. BUT, it certainly wasn't ideal.

I will spare you the details, as they are not pretty. I will go as far as giving you an analogy as to what chaos was spread throughout the house…

...Imagine you have toast, and you put a dab of butter directly in the middle of the bread…If you had your knife cover the entire surface of the bread, needless to say you would smear butter all over the place! NOW imagine that said knife wasn't made to spread butter..and had a very intricate motor inside, that was made to suck up small itty-bitty crumbs from atop the bread. The butter would obviously ruin the inside of the high-tech knife right?

It was brutal..we spent about an hour and a half cleaning “butter” off of the floor and then taking apart the Roomba to clean the “butter” out of the bristles, vacuum, wheels and overall machine. When it was all said and done, we had everything to its original form, Roomba and floor (Maybe not my Sensei's sanity though).

However, I think it is fair to say that I do NOT plan to spar with my Sensei/Father/Roomba Poop Victim any time soon!

-Sensei Seth

@sensei_seth