Last week I spent a few days with my aunt and uncle. They have a four year-old son and always cook the greatest food. While I was there, something tragic happened in their household. It's taken me a few days to wrap my head around it and actually find words to express this horror. However, it started off simple, something I'm sure has happened to most of you...

Sometime between midnight and 1:30 AM, my aunt and uncle's puppy, Evie, pooped on their rug in the living room. She doesn't do that often, so it probably only happened because they forgot to let her out before they went to bed that night. Now, if you have a "Sherlock Holmes" mind, you may be wondering how we all knew the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30 AM. We were asleep, so how do we know that?

Why friends, it is because my aunt and uncle's Roomba, fancy-IRobot-vacuum-thingy, runs at 1:30 AM every night, while they sleep. Well, guess what? Their Roomba, fancy-IRobot-vacuum-thingy, found the poop. And so it began, the "pooptastrophe", the "poohpocalypse", the "poopening"

If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Why? Because if it happens, it will spread dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.

It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be in your carpet. It will be on your rugs. If it is near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. My aunt and uncle’s lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had ben mudding. Yes, mudding – like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road, but in poop.

So, as I am sleeping in the room next door, all I hear is groans and coughs and I immediately burst out of bed, only to find my poop-covered, baby cousin crawling in bed with his mom and dad and they wonder why he stinks so bad. My uncle walked into the living room, and wondered why the floor felt so gritty. Then, he sees it… 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. My uncle was still half asleep, but at this point, he wakes up pretty quickly.

And then, the horror began…

First, you clean the child. He scrubbed the poop off of my cousin’s feet and put him back in the bed. However, he didn’t bother cleaning his own feet, because he knew what was coming, the inevitable, and boy, was it coming at him like a freight train! Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But, my uncle isn’t that kind of guy, he couldn’t go back to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.

So, he cleaned the Roomba. He tossed it in the bathtub to let it soak. He pulled it all apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point he became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30 AM-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. I just stood there and felt sorry for him. By now, the poop wasn’t just on his hands, it was up to his elbows. All of the sudden, the Roomba made a “whirllllllll-boop-hisssss” noise that sounds like electronics dying, and we realize, he forgot to pull the battery out before getting it wet. More on that later.

Oh, and he wasn’t just using profanity, my uncle was inventing new types of profanity. He was uttering things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. I am sure he was glad my cousin stayed in bed, because if his virgin ears would have heard what his father was saying, he definitely would’ve ended up in prison as an adult.

Then, he gets out the carpet shampooer. As I watched him push it up the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughed. Because that rug is going in the trash. But he shampooed it anyway because my aunt loves that rug.

We then get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if investing stock in paper towels would be smart, and we blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. After, we get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak because the poop has already dried.

By then it’s 6 AM, and we go to sleep, leaving the rest to finish tomorrow.

The next day my uncle finishes taking apart the Roomba, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop and after watching YouTube instructional videos, he removed the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then, he bakes it in the oven to dry, (quite frankly, I was confused by this, but anyway). He put it all back together and of course it doesn’t work. I think it was because of the “whirlllllllllll-boop-hissssss” noise that we heard when it died its poop death in the bathtub. And it was sad because my uncle told me that he hoped maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy.

HOWEVER, there was light at the of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix the $400 Roomba without spending $400 again, he finally decided to call the original company it was bought from, a place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. So he called them, told them the truth, that his Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III. And you know what they did? They offered to replace it! They are replacing the Roomba that ran over dog poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub- by no fault of their own, of course.

When my uncle was telling people this story, that was his whole mora, ”Buy things from, Hammacher Schlemmer because they have a good warranty.” But, because I am telling the story, this time, my moral is: ALWAYS TAKE YOUR DOG OUT TO USE THE BATHROOM BEFORE YOU FALL ASLEEP!