Not Everyone Delivers Praise For Rented Robot

He wanders off and gets lost like a befuddled pothead.

He cruises the halls slightly faster than a sloth with gout and has been known to fall asleep on the job.

There’s a rumor floating around he tried to have sex with a fax machine.

Not everyone thinks Sacred Heart Medical Center’s new Rudy the Robot is the grooviest mechanical critter since R2-D2.

“Rudy’s supposed to free up our time, but it’s really creating more work for us,” grouses pharmacy technician Mike Mukai, a 20-year Sacred Heart employee.

“If anybody ever sat down and figured out what we are paying to support this stupid thing, they’d find it to be a very expensive joke.”

Even so, the squatty contraption has been a cause celebre since administrators brought it in four weeks ago to run drugs between the basement pharmacy and nursing stations throughout the medical center.

Excited Cub Scouts come to ooh and ahh over Rudy. He’s been profiled in cute stories by this newspaper and TV news crews.

Rudy doesn’t look like any of the macho robots I grew up with. My robots were way cool science-fiction movie robots like the long-armed Robby from “Forbidden Planet.” Or the indestructible Gort, who fired a death beam out of his cyclops eye in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Rudy doesn’t have arms or even claws. Despite a winking orange light and blue racing stripes, he looks like a 574-pound trash compactor on wheels.

But there’s an unreported dark and clunky side to Rudy, claim some pharmacy workers who invited me in for a chat. We usually discuss new developments openly in meetings, says pharmacist Marty Stimac. “But this thing got rammed through by this lady.”

The “lady” is Brigitte Palmer, the pharmacy’s assistant director, also known as “Rudy’s mom.”

Miffed workers contend Palmer brought in this Stepford Guy mainly to give the humans a not-too subtle message: You waste too much time gabbing. You can be replaced.

Rudy’s ma doesn’t do much to soothe her bruised employees.

“So, we’ve been successful?” she quips when asked about her critics. “Well, we’re working on coffee breaks now.”

Palmer has taken glib to an art form. “Maybe jealous would be a better word for it,” she says of the Rudy-haters.

Programmed with a map of the hospital’s maze of corridors, Rudy uses infrared sensors and a U.S. Navy gyroscope to mule the drug supplies locked inside him.

He can call his own elevator and speaks a few unoriginal phrases in a voice flat enough to make Al Gore sound animated.

The medical center doesn’t own Rudy. It rents him for about $6.50 an hour from a company called HelpMate.

That sounds like a bargain, but Mukai and the others say it doesn’t figure in all the unaccounted time spent by staff members who must deal with Rudy’s frequent screw-ups and glacial pace.

“If he had to make a stat delivery, I don’t see how that would work,” says pharmacy technician George Hintz.

The other day, Rudy was stuck again, blinking helplessly in a hallway. Some joker hung a cardboard sign on him with the words, “Please help. Will work for WD-40.”

The wisecracking Palmer was reportedly not amused.

According to her, Rudy is here to stay. “He’s like any new employee,” she adds. “You’ve got to give him a chance to learn his job.”

Rudy better be careful. Unless someone arms him with a death beam he could end up taking a long ride out a seventh-floor window.

I’d hate to envision a brave new world, a scary place where humanity ends up second banana to an army of rolling trash compactors.

Nah, says Sacred Heart maintenance worker Mike Uber, as we watch the robot creep into an elevator to make a delivery. “It’s too easy to get him confused. Then Rudy bumps up against the wall like a drunk old man.”

, DataTimes