The 'small caps' really gave it away to me but I wasn't familiar with which book - thank you! The Death books were always very humanizing in an interesting way, His scenes were always my favourite.
I always wondered why nobody has invented a roomba that was a lawn mower. You set up the lawn boundries, and it just zips around once every two weeks cutting your grass.
And then you just sit inside and watch your beer, while drinking a tv.
Autonomous lawn mowers (lawn mower robots) are a thing for about ten years now over here in Germany. I see them everywhere, just silently and slowly rolling around and mowing around the clock.
They are also very efficient in killing hedge hogs and frogs and the likes - humans pushing a lawn mower trend to keep such animals alive whereas the robots simply shred them. They have no device to detect small animals and nobody cares to implement any which says a lot about humankind.