Take That To The Bank

 iRobot is headed into bankruptcy. This may not seem like a big deal to anyone who doesn't own a Roomba, but if you happen to have a machine that vacuums your house while you're away it seems like an unnecessary tragedy. 

Okay. Given the past week or two, this may be overstating the facts, but this comes fast on the heels of the announcement that Tivo will no longer be making or servicing hardware. We were one of the first to own the first commercially available digital video recorders. My wife heard that this company was having an essay contest, and the winners would receive a fancy new DVR that would eventually give us a new verb: Tivo, ias in "Are you going to Tivo that show, or watch it live?" 

That piece of writing is not currently available online, but I can tell you that it was very persuasive, which is how we got our box that would watch TV for us. My wife correctly predicted that it would make her a better wife and mother, allowing her to indulge her fixations of things other than TV until the time was right, and raising a son who was able to pause a program to wash his hands before sitting down to yet another episode of Bob The Builder. 

We liked it so much, we bought another, for the bedroom TV. This allowed us to record up to six different shows at the same time, allowing us to amass a library of movies and sitcoms and special events that would eventually be deleted because we could not remember what moved us to save them in the first place. We were also able to cause a fuss with Comcast, who desperately wanted us to rent their DVR along with our monthly service. "No thank you, but will you please come out and hook up our Tivos?"

There is a similar curve to the ownership of a Roomba. It's a great labor saving device. Until it eats a power cord. Or gets its brushes tangled around the stray cat toy. Then the labor is spent not by our robot overlord but by the ones being lorded over. Untangling the mess, or searching the house to find the wayward droid whose batteries ran out before it could return to Toschi station for a recharge. 

We call our robot vacuum Noo-Noo, after the sentient cleaning apparatus from the world of Teletubbies. We had several episodes of Teletubbies on our Tivo which makes the whole deal one great big circular mess. 

Back when we got our first DVR, we purchased a lifetime subscription to their service. When the original machine gave up the host, the folks at Tivo were happy to apply that contract to the new machine we bought. Imagining that machines would eventually rule the world, we didn't imagine that lifetime would be less a hardware matter, not an issue for the banks to settle. 

I guess the true story of Skynet would end when Cyberdyne went into Chapter 11.