It has been another mystifying, horrifying week on a lot of levels, so forgive me for focusing on something totally different.
I have discovered those round, robot vacuums that make their way around rooms on their own, with no human help. Now, admittedly, vacuuming is my least favorite chore, especially in the years since an elbow injury made some traditional vacuums almost impossible to use. Unlike dishwashing and refrigerator cleaning, which I love for some reason, I don't seem to really register the cleanliness results of vacuuming, so can find myself leaving it much too long.
However, I love delegating, and I love watching this robot in action! Here I am, with my ridiculously high IQ, absolutely mesmerized by the thing. When it hits the leg of a chair, it rotates a few degrees and tries to go in the new direction. If it's blocked again, it may circle around 180 degrees, or 90, or even just slightly. It seems to know when to circle around a table leg or doorway. It seems to get itself out of all but the most impossible scrapes, and even then, a disembodied voice alerts you to the fact that it's in trouble and needs to be moved. How, I wonder, does it "decide" what the next tack will be? And how does its tiny little brush pick up so much dirt?
My lifetime has seen perhaps millions of new inventions, many of which are part of my day-to-day life. And yet I have to confess that this is the first one whose inventors I can imagine in their lab. I can imagine them busy at work designing, going through unsuccessful efforts, making hundreds of test runs, then cheering in celebration once they realized it worked, high fives all around. I mean, I find myself cheering the darned thing! I'm kind of jealous of inventors of practical life tools...when your creative output is entirely of the musical, artistic and written nature, you're never sure how or if your efforts are changing lives. You may never get paid. You may never be sure if anything you have done has made people smile or do a happy dance!
But I sure am grateful for all the inventors out there, particularly of this funny little machine. And may we all, when faced with roadblocks and discouragement, just kind of shift direction a few degrees and give the new path a try. Silly whirring noise optional.
