Dobby Got Wedged Again

My pet Roomba, Dobby, got himself stuck under the corner of an upholstered sofa. Again.

It took me 3 tries before Dobby completed vacuuming my living room. He got stuck under the corner of the sofa twice. I’m officially changing Dobby’s Mortal Enemy from “chair legs” to “upholstered easy chair”.

Dobby really did get wedged - his “face” is pushed down, and his tail is levered up.

Here’s the map from the first time he got wedged.

I’ve circled in red where he actually got stuck. I think Dobby’s dead reckoning might have been off. I moved some chairs from the actual breakfast bar, which are usually in the hatchet-shaped zone to the right of where Dobby’s map locates him. It’s possible that he just steamed full speed ahead into the corner of the sofa because his dead reckoning put him out in the open floor.

Dreadful and Exasperating iRobot The App

I’ve previously written about how abjectly stupid the iRobot The App is. I had an equally enraging experience this time.

Do I need to write more? There are, in fact, no buttons labeled “Resume” or “CLEAN” on Dobby. The human voice that emanates from Dobby in times of distress claimed “Error 38”, which reminded me of the time when I wrote a big app for the phone company.

There was a place in the code where an alternative occurred that the Subject Matter Experts swore up and down would not happen. There was just no way the flow of control would get there. As a programmer, I had to fill it in somehow, so I wrote code that would display something about how “Grotesque and Horrible Error Number 3” had occurred in Klod, Wyoming.

About a year later, I got a call from a higher up asking me where, exactly, was Klod, Wyoming, and did I think we had an installation there.