It’s been dubbed ‘The Poopocalypse’, ‘The Pooptastrophe’ and ‘The Pooppening’.
A couple from Arkansas have revealed the horror of waking up to discover their house covered in dog faeces after a mishap with their robot vacuum.
Jesse Newton said ‘every conceivable surface’ was left covered in his dog’s poo after it was picked up by his Roomba, an automatic robot vacuum cleaner.
In the light-hearted post, which has racked up over half a million shares and likes on Facebook, the father revealed how he forgot to let their puppy, Evie, out before they went to bed.
“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,” he joked.
He warned: “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. 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. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house.”
He added: “Then, 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.”
Mr Newton went on to explain he has been offered a replacement Roomba from the store where he purchased it.
A spokesperson for iRobot, who makes the Roomba, told The Guardian: “Quite honestly, we see this a lot.
“We generally tell people to try not to schedule your vacuum if you know you have dogs that may create such a mess...”
iRobot added that its engineers were aware of the problem, adding there was no current solution to the problem.