V – My Vacuum Sucks!
It was a steal. I should have known right off the bat that there was something wrong with this vacuum. Who buys a state-of-the-art Roomba for $150.00? Well, I did. How could I not at that price?
Setting it up was pretty easy. Then came the learning curve. I’d placed it in the middle of my living room and set it to clean. It was fun watching it in action. It would cross the room, just come short of the wall and move in another direction until it found another obstacle. It wasn’t long before the whole living room was vacuumed, and I didn’t have to do a thing. It only took me three days for the Roomba to learn all of the rooms of my ranch house.
On reading more instructions from the manual, I discovered that I could program the Roomba to clean the house even when I wasn’t there. It was smart enough to start itself, vacuum the rooms, empty itself if it got full, and even knew when to recharge itself when its battery ran low. I scheduled the Roomba to clean every day when I was at work. What more could I ask for?
What I could have asked for was the identity of the person who had sold it to me and if he had a criminal record.
It was about 2 weeks after I purchased it that I realized that I was beginning to miss things. First, it was that expensive Apple Watch that I had bought last year and left charging during the day at home because I hadn’t charged it the night before. Then there was cash. I kept a large quantity of emergency cash in a file cabinet in my den. I came home one day, needed some cash for a date I was going on that evening, went to the den to get some, and all the money was gone. The envelope was there, but the cash was gone. After my 55-inch Ultra High Def TV and my iMac got taken, I decided to involve the police.
They immediately suggested that it was someone I knew since there didn’t seem to be any signs of a break-in. My house runs on electronics, I have electric locks on every door. I have security cameras at every door and all sorts of alarms. Someone would have had to be a very good hacker to bypass all that security. It turned out that someone didn’t have to be a good hacker. They just needed an inside accomplice, which they had. Its name was Roomba.
It turns out that this particular Roomba had a lot more sensors than it should have had. It had visual and auditory capabilities which allowed it not only to hear everything I said but also see everything I did. I tend to talk to myself a lot, living alone, so it heard me every time I mentioned I was going to get cash. It heard me saying the numbers aloud as I unlocked the door to my house. While the Roomba was cleaning my house it was also transmitting the layout of my house and all the visuals and audio recordings to the said thief. The Roomba was very efficient in connecting to my home network and controlling the camera shots, which happened to blank out when all the thievery was done, not to mention unlocking the doors to the house and disabling the alarms.
Once the police got involved, it all came out. The biggest clue was that the Roomba was missing. Who steals a vacuum cleaner? Police Computer forensics were able to determine the location of the hacks, which was the Roomba, but not where it had transmitted its information, without the Roomba itself, which as I stated was the last thing stolen. So far, the police have had no luck in finding any of my things.
So here’s a word of caution for you all. Be careful when looking for a great deal on a robotic vacuum cleaner. What might look like a great deal, might just clean you out.
