Some things are disappointing. Doctor Pepper and a movie without popcorn are high on the list. But the highest, even higher than losing a high stakes poker game, is muddy footprints. No matter how high, wide, long, or narrow you make this list, nothing tops getting mud tracked all throughout your house. On Dr. Stewart’s list of disappointing things, he wrote, ‘Muddy footprints’ in large sloppy handwriting at the top. The next items on his list went like this: Mud in the carpet, Mud on the bed, Mud under the cupboard, Footprints on the table, Mud on the toilet seat, Dirt on the walls… Dr. Stewart hated mud. 

Stewart gazed forlornly at the circuits and wires that used to be his microwave. Maybe he had twisted a little too hard. It was a good thing he had destroyed, though accidentally, his smoke alarm a few weeks ago because it would be blaring like a, a, well, like a smoke alarm. The microwave, or what remained of it, smelled like charcoal. Stewart sighed. He would need to make another chicken casserole. Well, that just about did it for his carbon powered perpetual motion experiment.

The inventor shrugged and trudged to the whiteboard, picked up a red marker, and under ‘Dirt on the walls’ he wrote ‘Having your microwave turned into a black mess that smells vaguely of overdone casserole’. He would have to think of another way to prove that the conservation of energy was only a myth. Stewart was just writing the E in ‘casserole’, when the door creaked open. The inventor had designed the door to automatically open and close, which was sometimes hazardous and caused many aching fingers. A draft of frigid, rainy air crept in, and Stewart could hear the noise that puddles make when they drown. Above the noise was a bark. Circuit yelped and bounded in, the door almost closing in his tail. 

The dog looked at the table where the remains of the microwave smoldered. It took quite a lot of imagination to detect the smell of chicken casserole amid all the zinc oxide. Ever since he was a puppy, Circuit had an irritating ability of chasing down things only minutely related to food. The inventor watched as Circuit made a little bound onto the table and crunched up the mass of charcoal. It was then that Stewart noticed. His eyes traveled from the tabletop to the ground, then across the carpet and finally to the door. Footprints. Muddy footprints. There were 23 and a half of them, and they all looked very muddy. 

Stewart groaned. This happened way too often, and Circuit had never learned that it might be impolite. The dog looked up and smiled, as much as a dog can smile with a mouthful of charred food, jumped down and raced into the hallway. The muddy footprints chased him. Stewart yelled and chased the muddy footprints until he caught up with them, took them to the bathroom and washed them off. After that, he wiped up the footprints that had been deposited along the way. Finlay, he vacuum cleaned the carpet. It was then, while he was viciously attacking a recalcitrant footprint, that he got the idea.

Dr. Stewart had a passion for inventing things. He filled his small house with gadgets and other mechanical devices from his thirty-some years of being an inventor. Among his successful inventions were: self sculpting modeling clay, a moving hatstand, a supercomputer with the brain the size of a brontosaurus (that is the brain of a brontosaurus), an automatic dog trimmers, and his most helpful creation, the left-handed toaster. But none of his inventions would be as practical as this new one. 

He called it the RUG, Remover of Unwanted Grime. It was one centimeter thick, one meter wide, half a meter long, and looked like an ordinary door mat with floral decorations. But unlike every other ordinary rug, the RUG was much more efficient. Stewart had attached many tiny tubes to its bottom. Then he ran the tubes through the floor and into a tank that he’d hid in the wall. A modified vacuum cleaner sucked air through the tubes and into the tank. When someone stepped onto the RUG, it would suck the mud off his feet.

Stewart glued the last tube in place. Now he would need to test his invention. Stewart trudged outside and bounded into the nearest pile of mud. He should have probably thought that through. Stewart glanced down at his white — or what used to be white — lab coat. Back inside the house, the inventor made an impressive ceremony of stepping onto the RUG. Without the muddy lab coat, or the rumpled hair, or the general un-coolness, he might have vaguely resembled Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon. But as it was, he very much resembled an inventor slipping on a banana. Stewart got to his feet. He considered adding self-tying shoes to his project list. Looking down, he saw, to his amazement, that instead of there being a slimy brown smudge where he had tripped, there was nothing. No mud. No mud! How spectacular!

The RUG worked perfectly. The only annoyance, although it was tolerable, was that every time someone stepped on it, the RUG would sound like a 5-year-old trying to sip out the bottom of his empty juice box. For two weeks Stewart enjoyed a clean home where he could work in peace… 

Stewart pulled off a loose, mud-caked board from his neighbor’s fence. He probably wouldn’t miss it; he hadn’t missed the last dozen, yet. He needed this board for his new sandwich consuming machine. With the inventor’s free hand, he opened the door. It was a good thing he had his RUG. It would take care of anything. He was wrong. When Dr. Stewart ran the board over his invention, the only thing that happened was that he got his hands even muddier. Sighing and scratching his head, more or less like a monkey, Stewart stared at the RUG. The RUG, being only floor mat, could not stare back, but made a conscious effort. Stewart removed his boots, examined the RUG, grabbed some supplies, and examined the RUG again. In a few minutes, the RUG had a new improvement. Stewart cranked the voltage dial up to 0.5 gigawatts. Instantaneously, the sound of a thousand five-year-olds slurping their empty juice boxes reached the inventor’s ears. His hair tugged at his skin as the RUG sucked and slurped up the mud on the board. Forty mile per hour winds shook the house, papers flew everywhere. The board clattered to the floor, spotless. It was a good thing that Stewart had equipped the RUG with a laser sensor. Whenever something broke the path of the laser, like a board, the RUG would start up. When nothing was in the laser’s way, the RUG stopped. 

A few hours later, Stewart was buttering a PB&J sandwich when he remembered. He had cranked up the voltage on the RUG and had forgotten to turn it back down! If anyone stepped in, they would trigger the RUG, and… Stewart couldn’t imagine the trouble that he would get into if that happened. He needed to turn it off immediately! 

It was at that moment that the doorbell rang. Stewart panicked. His mind raced, trying to decide how to warn the visitor. The doorknob turned. The hinges creaked in warning, but being hinges, they could only do so much. A polished black shoe of a man clopped in, inches from the now hazardous RUG. Stewart rushed, like a man being chased by a pack of clean-shaven terriers, towards the door. He tried to yell, but, as they usually do in a crisis, his vocal cords took a vacation. The expensive shoe turned into a pant leg and the pant leg turned into the grinning form of the mayor.

“Hello, Stewart. So glad to see you,” said the mayor, the tip of his shiny designer shoes inching closer to the laser sensor. One more step would trigger the RUG. “I would like to congratulate you on your recent invention of the left-handed toaster. You don’t know how many citizens of this town have benefited from it. On behalf of the city, we would like to give you this token of honor. Dr. Stewart, we—” The mayor was cut off by a small whirring. The sound grew into thousands of five-year-olds sucking and slurping at the bottom of an empty juice box. 

The mayor had stepped forward to shake the inventor’s hand, but now not only was his hand shaking, his whole body was rumbling! Stewart reached the RUG right after the nick of time. He slid across the floor towards the vibrating mayor. With a yell and a look of confusion, the mayor toppled forward. His shoes did not. The mayor stumbled back to his feet and turned towards the RUG. Then he made the horrible mistake of reaching for his shoes. The vacuum of the RUG yanked the mayor’s head and shoulders forward onto the mat. His face looked like he was losing a wrestling match with an octopus. Now instead of the five-year-olds sucking their juice boxes, they were slurping the city mayor to the ground! Stewart felt the pull of the RUG as he slammed on top of the mayor. It took all of Stewart’s strength to extend a finger toward the voltage dial on the wall, but the RUG pulled his hand down to the mat. It was like being squashed by a tortilla press, except without the burning hot medal. Stewart considered the possibility of spending the rest of his life wallpapered to his invention. How would he get food? How would he move his wrist so it was not poking into his ribs so much? How would his organs function with this much pressure on them? He didn’t have time to answer any of these worrying questions because at that precise moment, there was a click. 

Stewart sat up and rubbed his head. The RUG had lost power. Good. The fact was that the RUG hadn’t lost power. Something deep in its machinery had broken, but that did not mean that it had lost power. That did not mean that the RUG had stopped doing damage. And that certainly did not mean that Stewart’s problems were over. Inside the wall the RUG’s mud storage tank began crinkling like a soda can. 

“Well,” Stewart said, “at least we don’t have any mud on us.” And it was at this precise moment that the RUG made an unfamiliar sound. It sounded as if a herd of elephants were blowing their nose all at once. With a deafening cough, the RUG reversed its systems. Mud sprayed into the air. It soaked into the mayor’s suit. It ruined the mayor’s shoes. It splattered into the walls. It flooded across the floor. It pounded into Stewart’s side. It went everywhere. Though it only took a second, afterwards the entire house, mayor and all, looked brown, tasted brown, felt brown, and even sounded a little brown. Stewart Looked up into the face of a blob of mud that probably was the mayor. The blob did not look the least bit thrilled. 

Some things are disappointing. Marshmallow-filled chocolate donuts, full-color back tattoos, airplane headphones and movies based on great books are high on the list. Muddy footprints indeed deserve a top placement. Still Stewart hoped he would be better equipped to predict the unintended consequences of future inventions. Well-worn solutions, like well-worn front door mats, actually do a good enough job keeping mud out of houses, and, as an extra bonus, are mostly safe. And that’s not too disappointing.

THE END