Scooba

I love shopping online. I really do.

You just click-click-click and they send stuff to you. That’s great for us urban dwellers who don’t own cars.

Whenever I have to pay shipping fees, like $9.95, I just chalk that up to transportation expense. After all, how does $9.95 compare to a car payment, insurance, and gasoline? Parking, alone, where I live is over $200 a month.

Woot.com is really fun. Every day, they have one nifty electronic product on sale. Only one. Sometimes, it’s a really good buy; other days, not so much. The great thing about Woot is that you can read the buyers’ comments right there on the home page.

The other day, Woot had these 16-GB flash drives on sale for $19.99. The comments were great. Everyone loved them.

Unfortunately, it was such a good buy that Woot was sold out of them by 10 am that day. If it's a really hot product, you have to act fast.

Today’s product is a “Scooba” floor-cleaning robot. It’s like a Roomba robot-vacuum, only the Scooba washes, scrubs, and dries your floor.

I thought this little robot-slave would be a great thing for me to have. I have marble floors in my trapezoid-shaped hallway and kitchen. They look really nice but I constantly have to clean them to keep them looking that way.

A robot would be great. Besides, it was cute.

Fortunately, I read the comments. They went something like, “It kept leaving puddles and I had to chase it around with a towel.” . . .

And, “It died after only six months.”

And, “It died after only six months.”

And, “It died after only six months.”

Sometimes, I open the door to my balcony to get some fresh air. I could just see the Scooba scooting out the door and hurdling itself 500 feet down in a kamikaze dive to the pedestrians below.

So, I did not order a Scooba even though it was blue and pretty cute (My main criteria for item selections).