Personal Narrative: Robotic Pool Cleaners

Around age 5 to 10, I went to my grandparent’s house every weekend and non-school night to swim in their sizable swimming pool. It has a 15-ft deep end, a separate hot tub, a slide (not a particularly safe one, but still fun), and a diving board. However, the only thing that I couldn’t stand about it was their robotic pool cleaner. The very cleaner that would soil my playtime and send me into terrified hysterics.
My fear of the cleaner was so intense, I managed to get my sister to be terrified of it too. We both would observe its pathing around the pool, what days my grandfather would take it out for maintenance, and pray for the occasion when our mother would join us in our aquatic arcadia so that we could enjoy ourselves in safety. Seeing this off-white beast would fill me with adrenaline and send me into what seemed like a panic attack, especially during its moments of attempting to entangle me in its spine-like tail or when it would climb the walls of the pool with witchcraft and spray water from the aforementioned tail that I avoided as if it possessed corrosive properties. The fear of the cleaner persisted with me for years at that pool, until it began to die off once I started to become more busy with things such as school as I got older and had less and less time for
Now, the pool cleaner was by no means a 20-ft man-eating fish with teeth, but the idea of something else being in the water with me, that something being able to maneuver independently with grace, all the while remaining mysterious, waiting to strike at its powerless victims at the right moments. Another thing that was presumably a factor was my chronic fear of the unknown that still persists with me to this day. At the time, as a child, not knowing what this thing in the water, was absolutely frightening to my guileless