1.
We start this weekend with a health and security warning for all of our UK readers venturing out for a last blast of summer sunshine, for our Canadian and US audience gearing up for Labo(u)r Day weekend, for children of all shapes and sizes and adults hovering around five feet in height. For the past three years I’ve been monitoring the arrival of robot floor cleaners at airports, rail stations, office concourses and shopping malls around the world. I’ve been paying particularly close attention to their recent arrival at Zürich Airport and how they manage to interact with the waves of arrivals and departures. While I’ve yet to spot any head-on collisions, there are certainly plenty of near misses and much dodging and weaving as these robots have a tendency to make abrupt stops and spins. But this is not the problem. Far from it. The real danger is considerably more menacing than a simple scrape with an automated vacuum cleaner – pint-sized families could soon be consumed by rapidly mutating clusters of MDBs (monster dust bunnies).
The MDB, closely related to the more harmless domestic variety, can grow out of nowhere, multiply at speed and becomes a threat one to two weeks after a facility manager at a global transport hub lays off 25 cleaning staff and replaces them with a few robots. If David Attenborough isn’t on the case with his film crews just yet, he should be. Robot cleaners might make perfect sense from a cost perspective and can do an OK job cleaning surfaces but they’re simply not made to get into corners or tackle what’s under the rows and rows of seating between gates 63 and 65. The harmless little dust bunny that used to scurry away when you sped past with your Rimowa wheelie has now been gorging on other bunnies, bits of food and the strands and scraps of exotic fluff that collects in hard-to-reach spaces.
The other day I spotted a pair of MDBs so large that I thought they were going to devour a pair of toddlers who’d been let out of their tandem pram. Pooooofffff!!! They could have vanished in a flash but the MDBs decided the pair weren’t so appetising and tumbled behind a check-in desk instead, waiting for the right moment to strike. Next time you think that you’ve misplaced your phone or coffee at a boarding gate, you didn’t. A matted, greasy and stinky MDB got to it first. Airports might think that they’re being clever by replacing staff with automated cleaning devices but just look around and you’ll see that robots are leaving thousands of square metres uncared for and it’s only a matter of time before a MDB gets sucked into the engine of an A350 or invades a cockpit. You read it here first.
2.
On the topic of keeping surfaces spic and span, I landed from Chicago earlier this morning and I was impressed. Granted, I was mostly in and around Lincoln Park and the nicer stretches of North Lakeshore Drive but European (Lisbon, Athens, Paris pay attention) and many North American cities (you too Toronto) could take a few cues on keeping streets and vertical surfaces spotless from the good people of Chicago.
I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of graffiti, the well-planted avenues, the attention paid to the urban canopy and the absence of so much as a candy wrapper in the gutter. While this was only a 24-hour trip and my first visit in about a decade, I’m keen to go back and spend more time walking around other neighbourhoods and getting a better measure of the place.
3.
Finally, get your agenda prepped and at the ready for this time next week. We have an autumn packed with events spanning from intimate evening gatherings in our shops to bigger formats in Abu Dhabi, Zürich and London. And if you can’t wait for those, we can still find you a seat in Barcelona at our Quality of Life Conference – 4 to 6 September.
Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.
