In domestic news, an issue has arisen with the robot vacuum cleaner. Our noisy old one annoyed me so much, bashing repeatedly into the skirting and swallowing rug tassels in confusion, that I stamped violently on its off button every time I caught it trying to do its job.
The new one is less relentlessly stupid, but just as loud, and since my husband programmed it, it appears to always be on. It lurches out at 10am and is still roaring around when I come downstairs, hours later. After a brief hiatus, it re-emerges in the afternoon. It’s so noisily industrious, I feel simultaneously enervated and shamed by its productivity. Let me stare at the internet in peace, robot!
I queried this last week; apparently, my indifferent-to-noise spouse has instructed it to do the whole ground floor in the morning and the kitchen in the afternoon. I have questions, such as: it’s just him, me and the dog – how much hair and skin can we shed in a 24-hour period? But since I’m invariably the asshole in our marriage and trying hard not to be, I went along with it. For sanity purposes, however, if my husband is out at 10am I press “Send home” on the vacuum cleaner app the second I hear it start to whirr, figuring what he can’t see won’t hurt him.
This would have been a perfect arrangement, were it not for the robot itself. It has started refusing to go back to its base, sitting out in the corridor sulking until my husband finds it, or going home then lurching back out seconds later. Worst of all, one night, it decided to start cleaning at 9pm in total defiance of its schedule and nocturnal “do not disturb” setting. We tried to turn it off remotely, but it kept whirring until I stamped on it, like in the old days. Have I angered a sentient technology by not letting it do its job? Now I’m just praying it doesn’t somehow suck up a razor blade and come for our achilles tendons.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
