Today after school, I found a cleaner bot choking on one of the left over basket wires that I had accidentally left on the floor last night. I must have forgotten to pick it up this morning on my way to school. This was strange because I almost never see the little things around, as they often do their cleaning out of sight and hide under couches and beds when humans are around. When I was little, I used to always have fun trying to pull them out from their hiding spots as they frantically attempted to return to their dark refuges... Anyway, this poor thing had half of the length of the wire down its vacuum slot and was choking pitifully as it whirled around trying to get it’s vacuum propeller unstuck. They are usually able to un-jam themselves and get back to work, I let it whirl around for a while as I put down my book bag and woke up my computer. Then as I was beginning to think about finding Gerard our Butler-Bot to see if he could help me take apart and unjam the poor cleaner bot, Gerard came floating in to investigate the noise the cleaner bot was making as it went to greater and greater lengths to try and become unstuck. I exclaimed “Hey Gerard, I think the cleaner bot needs some help puking up the wire it tried to suck up”. “Indeed young master”, the robot replied as he performed a laser scan of the cleaner bot, “the R42 Cleaning Unit’s suction system appears to have suffered serious damage. I will open it and see if I can fix it immediately.” With that statement, he swooped down upon the struggling cleaner bot and placed it under his arm like a package as he went out the door. “Wait! Can I watch you fix that robot?” I exclaimed rushing after Gerard. “Certainly sir, but compared to the cooker robot that you watched me and the engineer fixed last time, the internals of this cleaner robot are probably going to be quite boring... I would imagine you have homework and other more interesting things to do.” Gerard replied. “Oh no Gerard, I really do want to see you try to fix the robot”, I replied. So Gerard relented and let me accompany him down the stairs and into the robot docking area in the basement. It was their central hub where all the robots came to, rest, recharge, reboot, be cleaned, and undergo necessary maintenance. Gerard and I moved by the little queue of robots parked in stand by as they awaited orders to do routine cleaning and other tasks as specified by Gerard’s scheduling system or by special request of my family.
We then reached in the mini repair station where Gerard kept tools to fix simple problems with the house hold robots. After shutting down the feebly struggling cleaner bot, Gerard opened its chassis and proceeded to take out it’s internal components. When he finally took out the suction system, opened it up and extracted the wire which was tightly wrapped around one of propellers, and had broken the fins off of another fan. Gerard gave a sigh, and intoned “Oh dear, this is not good we may need to replace this unit...” “Replace?, what do you mean replaced? We are not seriously going to throw the robot out just because it broke a propeller trying to do a task it was supposed to do right?” Gerard blinked at me, and explained “Young sir, it is not only his propeller, but the driving mechanism that rotates the propeller was also over stressed, it can no longer provide adequate suction. Here I’ll show you”. He re-assembled the cleaner robot turned it on, and then directed it to clean a little bit of dirt that had fallen off of my shoe as I had walked into the basement. The scene was kind of pitiful...the little cleaning bot was initially over joyed to find itself free of the wire and immediately zoomed over to the clump of dirt attempting to whirl its faulty fans at full speed. Normally it would have only taken one pass for the cleaner bot to vacuum up that clump of dirt, however 20 passes later, the clump of dirt was still sitting on the floor and the damaged cleaning bot was beeping hysterically next to it. Gerard hovered over and gently shutdown the cleaner bot, recorded the incidence as a bug report and uploaded the cleaner bot’s logs to the company that manufactured the R42 Cleaning Unit as a bug report and dropped the machine into the recycling chute. He then turned to me and said “I have just finished taking care of the damaged cleaning unit, and will be sending in a request to you father to order another one. If that is all, I will escort you back to the main part of the house from which I must begin preparations for dinner and you will be free to do other things such as your homework.” I wasn't feeling particularly hungry as I climbed those stairs, the guilt over leaving the wire on the floor for the cleaning bot to choke on was making my stomach tie itself into knots.
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