On a whim one evening, I decided to post a question in the /AskReddit subreddit.
What is your robot vacuum’s name and why did you name it that?
Simple. Pretty open-ended.
Within minutes, I had more than 50 comments. I’m a pretty introverted person, so that level of, uhhh, engagement felt a little scary. Once the initial anxiety settled, I discovered that people have strong feelings about their robot vacuums. Love, hate, disdain. It’s a whole spectrum. And the names? Insanely creative. The puns alone had me cracking up. With permission from the commenters, I’m sharing some of their responses here because, honestly, they’re too good not to. One person even went with the rather hilariously unhinged “Rrrrrrrolling r’srapSCALLION III of the Loinst Quadrant.”
Some Redditors clearly put a lot of thought into naming their robot vacuums. My personal favorites? Florence the Machine, Clean Latifah, Meryl Sweep, and Suck Norris.
Many named their robot vacuums after fictional characters. One Redditor named theirs Rosie after the robot maid from The Jetsons. Another named theirs GLaDOS after the maniacal robot from Portal.
One particularly plucky Redditor named their robot vacuum Maple after the Toronto Maple Leafs because, well, “they suck.” The owner’s grandfather apparently disagrees.
Then there’s Margot Robot 2.0, whose predecessor eventually died and had to be replaced. And Tony Roomba, who, as u/fierydoxy revealed, “Turns out Tony is actually Antonia Roomba as she has a female voice.”
The backstories are pretty damn good, too. One person named their vacuum Geronimo because it kept going over the edge of the stairs despite its stair-detection feature. If you’ve never had a robot vacuum go tumbling down the stairs, consider yourself lucky. It’s a hair-raising experience. My first robot vacuum (R.I.P. Gerald) suffered such a fate.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
Some of these stories hit close to home, too. I review robot vacuums, so naturally, I have a few of them hanging around the house. For reasons I can’t quite explain, my husband and I refer to the one upstairs as Kevin.
Kevin is sort of an interesting guy. Although he does most things well, he’s got a nemesis. There’s a side table that he regularly gets stuck on. Once, he made so much noise when trying to free himself from that goddamned side table that my nosy greyhound came running from the other room to investigate. It’s ridiculous, I know. But I’ve also assigned him a name and a personality. So here we are.
Not every robot vacuum gets an affectionate moniker, though. Some earn their names out of sheer frustration. Like when it repeatedly gets stuck or misses entire sections of floor. Usually it’s some variation of an expletive.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away here, it’s this: People don’t just name their robot vacuums for fun. They’ve got genuine feelings about them, which I find endlessly fascinating. Some folks even mourn them when they stop working.
Maybe it’s because these disc-like machines spend so much time puttering around our homes. Occasionally they do the exact opposite of what we’re asking them to do. Along the way, they become part of the household.
And apparently, every member of the household deserves a name. Even if that name is “Stupid Spybot.”
