There are whole websites dedicated to helping you pick out a perfect name for your Roomba and Reddit threads to boot. Popular ones are Rosie (after the cleaning robot from The Jetsons), Jarvis (the Tony Stark's AI assistant), and DJ Roomba (a call-out to Tom Haverford's Roomba in Parks and Rec). Personally, I went with CL4P-TP as a reference to everyone's favorite robot to hate from the Borderlands series.
While I, and my roommate at the time, loved the name CL4P-TP (we were both in the middle of a fresh co-op playthrough of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel), we started to give CL4P-TP other nicknames. I don't mean we renamed the official nickname of my Roomba in the app, but truly gave the little vacuum nicknames, much the same way a dad might call his kid "champ" or a dog owner call's their dog names like "stinky." My old roommate, a man who calls the people he respects by their last name, always referred to him by his full name. Cracked's Carly Tennes speaks to my Roomba as "Sir Claptrap." I find myself referring to CL4P-TP by the name 'Roomboi' more often than not these days.
And that's not all. All the actions and decisions Roombas make feel like personality rather than programming. It's weirdly human. I swear that Roomboi will avoid the big pieces of trash on the floor until the very last second like he's trying to avoid the heavy lifting until last. Or the clumsy bouncing into walls really hard, while my Roomba is remapping after I move to a new apartment, is actually just him getting used to the new place. Or even the times I decide to move my reading chair to the other side of the room to have better light for that day -- my Roomba will sneak up onto the spot where it thinks my chair is, move really slowly into it, so it doesn't just slam its head into the leg of the chair, then become really confused when nothing is there, and kind of spins around for a bit.Â
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