Meet Kelly and Jesse Newton and their son, Evan. The family lives in Arkansas along with their year-old puppy, Evie.
Kelly Newton told BuzzFeed News that their rescue puppy is "lovable" and still in her "awkward silly" stage.
"She so funny and awkward and gives lots of kisses," Newton said. "She thinks she's a lap dog at almost 40 pounds."
With a young son and a puppy, Newton said their Roomba vacuum cleaner has been a huge help in keeping their home clean.
"It's been a lifesaver for us with puppy hair and 4-year-old's snack crumbs," she said.
However, the family had no idea that their puppy + Roomba could lead to an epic disaster they have deemed the "Pooptastrophe." Jesse Newton described the entire incident in a Facebook post that went viral this week.
Newton explained that they had programmed the Roomba to run through the house at 1:30 a.m. every morning. Unfortunately, this night Evie had an accident on a rug. The consequences were horrifying:
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. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.
He created a diagram to show exactly how awful this "Jackson Pollack" painting really was.
Jesse Newton wrote that he realized what had happened when Evan crawled into bed with them and he smelled like dog poop. He then slowly began to realize the horror that awaited him.
"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," he wrote. "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."
Jesse Newton wrote that he spent the next three hours cleaning everything: Evan, the carpets, and the Roomba. He added that his Roomba was replaced by the store due to a lifetime warranty.
He told BuzzFeed News that he was very "irritated" when he realized what had happened.
"I was mad at Evie for pooping (even though it was our fault), and I was mad at the inanimate robot that spread the poop all over our house," he said.
He added that he didn't wake his wife up during this, saying he figured he would let her sleep since he could clean it up on his own. Kelly Newton said that when she woke up she "knew that something epic had taken place."
"I also knew that whatever happened to Jesse warranted a well-deserved sleep-in that morning," she said. "I also made some connections at this point remembering Jesse coming to bed smelling like every cleaning product we own... I was at that point where I didn't know where to start... but I didn't want to wake Jesse up to see what happened."
Jesse Newton posted the story on Facebook to make his friends and family laugh and to warn them, his wife said. People thought the story was hilarious, and it has been shared more than 300,000 times.
Kelly Newton said that they never expected to get so much attention for their story about poop.
"I've loved watching Jesse's talented writing get its much-deserved exposure," she said. "He really is just a quiet, sweet, and humble guy."