Dad’s horrifying tale of Roomba’s run-in with dog poop goes viral

“So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household.”

One poor dad experienced an unfortunate incident the other night – one that he describes as ‘the poopocalypse’.

In a Facebook post that’s now been shared more than 300,000 times, Jesse Newton, from Arkansas, shared details of a cleaning mishap involving a Roomba and a fresh pile of dog poop (if you’re eating right now, you may want to save this story for later).

“Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop,” Newton wrote on his Facebook page. “If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. 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.”

“It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it.”

To make matters worse, Newton’s young son wandered into his parents’ bed, bringing the dog’s ‘special gift’ with him on his feet, which is how the dad originally learnt of the debacle.

“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…”

“And then the horror. Oh the horror.”

Newton’s hilarious story includes his attempts to clean the house as the rest of the family sleeps on, unaware of the horror unfolding in their home.

“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.”

There is a happy ending to the story – after Newton threw the Roomba into the bath to clean it, killing the machine, Roomba’s manufacturer, Hammacher Schlemmer, offered to replace the soiled device free of charge.

Read the full hilarious post on Jesse Newton’s Facebook page.