Mary Roach - My Planet

Roomba joined our family last week. Right away I changed the name to Reba, in order to indulge my fantasy of having a real cleaning person, yet still respect its incredibly dumb-sounding given name. As techno-gadgets go, the iRobot vacuum is surprisingly simple to use. All you do, beyond switching it on, is tell it the room size. This I calculated in my usual manner, by picturing six-foot guys lying end-to-end along the walls and multiplying accordingly.

I started Reba off in the bedroom. I was on my way out the door to enjoy life, when I heard a crash. My vacuuming robot had tangled itself up in the telephone cord and then headed off in the other direction, pulling the phone off the nightstand and onto the floor. “Maybe Reba needs to make a call,” said Ed.

I couldn’t, in all fairness, be annoyed, as I’m the sort of person who gets up to go to the bathroom on airplanes without first unplugging my headphones. Only the fact that my head is attached to my neck prevents it from being yanked off onto the floor. Also, it tells you right there in the Owner’s Manual to “pick up objects like clothing, loose papers… power cords… just as you would before using a regular vacuum cleaner.”

This poses something of a problem in our house. The corners and the floor space along the walls and under the furniture in the office, for instance, are filled with stacks and bags of what I call Ed’s desk runoff. My husband is a man who does not easily throw things away. Whatever he gets in the mail or empties from his pockets he simply deposits on the nearest horizontal surface.

Once a week, like the neighborhood garbage truck, I collect Ed’s discards and throw them onto a vast, heaping landfill located on his desk. At a certain point, determined by the angle of the slope and the savagery of my throws, the pile will begin to slide. This is Ed’s cue to shovel a portion of it into a shopping bag, which he then puts on the floor somewhere with the intent to go through it later, later here meaning “never.”

I looked at the floor in our office. There were newspapers, piles of files, socks, pens, not to mention the big guys lying along the floorboards. Picking it all up to clear the way for Reba would take half an hour, which is more time than I normally spend vacuuming. It was the same sort of situation that has kept me from ever hiring an assistant.

It would take longer to explain my filing system to someone else (“Okay, so takeout menus and important contracts go in the orange folder labeled ‘Bees’…”) than it would to do the chore myself.

The bathroom promised to be less problematic. I lifted the hamper into the tub and put the bathroom scale in the sink, where it looked as though maybe it wanted a bath, or maybe it had a date with a vacuum cleaner.

Then I went into the bedroom to fetch Reba, who was at that moment engaged in a shoving match with one of my Birkenstocks. She had pushed the shoe across the room and under the bed, well into the zone of no-reach.

“Good one,” said Ed, who has always harbored ill will toward comfort footwear for women.

I set Reba down and aimed her at the crud-paved crawlspace beneath the footed bathtub. I have tried this with Ed and various of my stepdaughters, but it always fails to produce the desired effect.

The wondrous Reba was not only willing but actually enthusiastic about the prospect, motoring full bore across the tile and under the tub and whacking her forehead on the far wall. You just can’t find help like that.

The living room was a similar success. Reba does housework much the way I do, busily cleaning in one spot for a while and then wandering off inexplicably in the opposite direction and getting distracted by something else that needs doing. The iRobot people call this an “algorithm-based cleaning pattern,” a term I will use the next time Ed catches me polishing silver with the mop water evaporating in the other room.

Halfway across the living room carpet, Reba stopped moving and began emitting undelighted noises. Ed leafed through the troubleshooting guide.

“It’s a Whimper Beep,” he said, employing the concerned baritone that used to announce the Heartbreak of Psoriasis as though it were the Cuban Missile Crisis. I turned Reba over. Wound around her brushes was a two-foot strand of dental floss. Apparently even robots have their limits.

The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacslike me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation.

This is the wonderful thing about looking up your symptoms on the Internet. Very quickly you find yourself distracted from your aches and pains. The symptom list for Arnold-Chiari Malformation is three pages long. Noting the four out of 71 symptoms that match, I conclude that I have this condition. A good hypochondriac can make a diagnosis on the basis of one matching symptom.

While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’”

“Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.”

Ha, ha. But I know how to get back at him. “Hey, what’s this thickening, or nodule, on the back of your neck?” Ed is more of a hypochondriac than I am. “Looks like it could be Antley-Bixler Syndrome,” I say.

I got this one from the National Organization for Rare Disorders website, which has an index of rare diseases that I’ve pretty much memorized. I move in for the kill. “Ever feel any fatigue?”

Ed gets on the computer to see if there’s a self-test for Antley-Bixler Syndrome. We’re big fans of self-tests, and the Internet is full of them. I once happily passed the afternoon self-testing for macular degeneration, emotional eating, hypochondria, bad breath. Ed found me taking the Self-Test for Swine Farm Operators. (“I conduct manure nutrient analysis: Annually. Every five years. Never.”) It’s probably fair to say that I’m addicted to self-tests, but until there’s a self-test for self-test addiction, I can’t be sure.

The dangerous thing about Internet diagnosis is that most hypochondriacs will attempt it late at night, when everyone else is asleep and no one is around to reassure them that they’re nuts. This is what happened to me on October 2, sometime past midnight, when I entered the words “red spots on my face” into the Google search page. I’d noticed the spots while scanning my face for starlike speckles, an early symptom of Ebola virus.

I ignored the 20 or 30 entries for broken capillaries and zeroed in on the following: “Leprosy… begins with red spots on the face…. Bones are affected and fingers drop off.” I began to feel panicky and short of breath. I added those symptoms to my search and found this: “I developed little red spots on my face and arms. Then last spring I started becoming short of breath….” Bottom line, I had interstitial lung disease.

I tried to keep calm. I tried to focus on entry No. 18: “Spicy pork rinds cause me to break out in red spots on my face.” I couldn’t recall eating spicy pork rinds, but perhaps I’d ordered a dish that was made with them but failed to state this on the menu. From now on, I’d be sure to ask. Waiter, is the flan made with spicy pork rinds?

In the end, it was no use. I was up all night, fretting over interstitial lung disease. For a hypochondriac, simply running the name of a new disease through your mind once or twice is enough to convince you that you’ve got it. I frequently remind myself of my stepdaughter Phoebe, who, some years ago, heard someone talking about mad cow disease. The next day when a friend of the family said, “Hi, Phoebe, how are you?” she stated calmly, “I have mad cow disease.” But Phoebe was a child. I am an adult. I should know better. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me.