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turns out when the light comes on and blinks a bunch before settling it indicates a problem with the sensor. learned this from google and had a shounen anime-style flashback ("when did--no, it can't be--!") to when i went over a particularly unpleasant manhole cover fifteen minutes earlier and Felt It.

then had another flashback, but distinctly more faded out and echoe-y, like from a multi-season mystery series where they remind you of some seemingly trivial detail from the first episode, of That One Relevant Tumblr Post, You Know The One

Sometimes the map shows that the vacuum has actually entered the non-existent space and is cleaning there, but obviously that's just the position tracking also screwing up, so it thinks it's somewhere far away and just maps it to the closest place it thinks exists.

The map keeps growing, though, and the vacuum's taking longer and longer to clean the whole house.

Eventually it's frustrating enough that you start setting aside time to watch it do the cleaning, so you can figure out what surface is confusing it and fix the problem.

Somehow the problem never happens when you're watching.

The vacuum seems more beaten up than you remember - scratches and small dents, nothing to stop it from working, but you're not sure where they came from.

Once, you look while it's cleaning and can't find it anywhere. The mobile app says it's cleaning the living room, but it's obviously not there. The app is often wrong, though, and when you hear it trundling around the dining room, which you just checked, you guess you must have just... missed it somehow?

When you empty its bin, there's strange, golden dust in it that you've never seen before.

You install a few cameras. Every time the vacuum malfunctions, it's always when it's behind something or in a dead zone between cameras. Even when you move the cameras. It's a different place every time.

Did you spill ketchup somewhere? There are desiccated flecks of brown and red in the vacuum bin.

You get a Bluetooth tracker - it's supposed to help you find your keys or your wallet if you misplace them - and you glue it to the vacuum.

That night, the vacuum has a new scrape on it, like it ran into something, and the tracker has been knocked off. You can't find it; the tracker app just says it's "out of range or turned off".

You look at your robotic vacuum. It's got more scratches and scrapes even than you remember from a few days ago. You check your camera footage and yeah, it's definitely gotten more beaten up. No footage of it running into anything, though.

One of the dents almost looks like a... bite mark? You must be imagining that.

You sit and think for a long time. You know it's just a machine; you know humans tend to anthropomorphize anything that moves (all the more so because of the googly eyes you attached when you got it), and you don't want to fall into that superstitious fallacy.

It's just a machine.

You look at the dents and cuts on its frame.

You sigh, turn off the cameras, and duct-tape a kitchen knife to the robot.

"Just don't scratch up the sofa." you mutter, feeling silly, and press the "clean now" button.

I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.

Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.

In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.

However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.

The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...

Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!

(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)

It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.

They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.

The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.

I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.

TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.

for the last few months, not knowing 100 gecs was a band, ive been saying "100 gecs" whenever i meant to say "lmao", "lol" and "lmfao" as a direct result of me misunderstanding this tweet.

my friends knew the band so they didnt have this misconception. and still they just kinda rolled with it??? like imagine something like your friend seemingly randomly saying the beatles, sometimes in all caps in the middle of their messages HELPP