Man’s story of attempting to clean a Roomba after it ran over a pile of dog poop in his house goes viral

“So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It’s taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror,” starts the epic tale of a self-cleaning device gone wrong that’s taking the internet by storm this week — because it’s a hilarious shit-show. Pun totally intended.

Who doesn’t want a Roomba? It’s a vacuum cleaning robot. It miraculously maneuvers its way over your floors; seamlessly gliding around furniture, into corners, and over area rugs. And it does it relatively silently, which is why most people just let the thing go at night and wake up to cleanliness.

Ideal right?

Unless you have a pile of fresh, soft dog shit in the middle of your floor. Then, not so ideal. Jesse Newton has a few names for what happens when a Roomba and fresh dog shit collide:

“The Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.”

So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It’s taken me until now to wrap my head around it and… Posted by Jesse Newton on Tuesday, August 9, 2016

“If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I’m about to tell you,” Newton ominously warns. “Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop… Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.” His ran over a fresh pile at 1:30 AM,when the rest of the house was sleeping. When his four-year-old got up to crawl into his bed at 3:00 AM, he was alerted to the disaster:

“When your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you’ll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you’ll walk into the living room. And you’ll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you’ll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything’s okay. Like it’s proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.”

“And then the horror. Oh the horror.”

Let’s take a moment to appreciate how terrible this is. Anyone who has a dog knows that even a speck of dog poop will eventually be detectable due to the rank smell. Imagine having shit all over your house.

Newton opts to clean his child off first, of course. “You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don’t bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what’s coming. It’s inevitable, and it’s coming at you like a freight train,” oh god. Poor guy. “Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you’re not one of those people – you can’t go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.”

Actually, no one in their right mind would ignore that. No way.

“So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn’t just on your hands – it’s smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that “whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss” noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.”

Yes, he tossed an entire electronic device into the bathtub.

Can’t. Stop. Laughing.

“Oh, and you’re not just using profanity – you’re inventing new types of profanity,” he explains. “You’re saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there’s no way he’s not ending up in prison.”

He’s not even close to done yet. “Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she’ll ask if you tried to clean it first.”

Oh, there’s more to the story. It involves more paper towels than any household should own, a steam mop, and a toothbrush — but you should really just read it in its entirety. There’s also a light at the end of the tunnel, because Roomba deemed the Pooptastrophe worthy of a full replacement of the $400 machine a desperate father tossed into the tub.

“I called them and told the truth,” explained Newton. “My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.”

Related: True Story: A Robot Vacuum Has Changed My Life