Anyone who's ever been owned by a cat knows that as cute and precocious as felines can be, there's nothing cute about the steaming piles they inevitably leave behind. (Especially when those steaming piles end up on the carpet just outside the litter box. Yeah.)

For a long time, our cat Ashe produced the most horrendous smelling poop that I've ever had the regrettable fortune to smell. Leaving his litter box for even a few hours without scooping was just begging the house to fill with a fragrance only ogres could appreciate. Ogres with missing olfactory senses, that is.

We tried various versions of your average litter box with no discernable improvements. Our considerable faculties having failed us, we opted to give the LitterMaid™ LM500 a chance -- after all, the questionable "couple" in the commercial made it seem like cleaning the litter box would be a retreat -- a lark akin to frolicking through the forests as golden beams of sunshine cascaded about your shimmering tresses while bunnies and chickadees serenaded your happiness.

In direct contrast to what LitterMaid's commercial would have you believe, no one in our household taunted another by saying "I'm cleaning the lit-ter-box!" in a sing-song voice reminiscent of playground idiocy; rather, we still dreaded each and every trip to the cats' "poop palace." I can't tell you how many times I wished heaps of fiery coals upon the heads of the engineers who designed the LitterMaid LM500. I'm sure it was a lot. Just read the following lies, direct from LitterMaid's web site:

The LitterMaid™ team has developed a self-cleaning litter box that takes the chore out of litter cleaning and provides you and your cat with a constantly clean, odorless environment.

If by "self-cleaning" they mean "You have to clean it yourself," and if by "constantly clean, odorless environment" they mean "So long as you constantly clean your litter box's environment, it'll be odorless," then I guess they're telling the truth.

What we experienced wasn't so...idyllic.

All too frequently, the thing would jam. Usually at about 4:00 AM. Which meant that the rake would grind its way back and forth across the litter area somewhere between five and six times (however many times was just enough to wake you) before finally giving up and leaving a heaping mass of clumped urine and poop waiting for you. In addition to changing the receptacles, we still had to scoop out the litter area and clean up around the LitterMaid. If anything, the LM500 only added steps to the litter removal process.

Frustrated with the wimpy LM500, we decided the only logical option was to shell out for the much larger, much more imposing, much more expensive LitterMaid Elite Mega LM9250. After all, this unit had a magical air ionizer that sprinkled pixie dust on odors every time the rake moved! It also had a sleep timer that allowed you to disable the rake for a nine hour period! Granted, it was roughly the size of an aircraft carrier, but surely with such technologically advanced features, it had to be better than its predecessor, right?

Wrong! Oh, so very, very wrong.

What the LM9250 made up for in fancy contraptions it lacked in execution. (Did I mention it was the size of an aircraft carrier?) Perhaps the air ionizer worked and my humble nostrils are just too superpowered for their own good, or the air ionizer was useless. At least the sleep timer worked. Once. Then the LitterMaid resumed its familiar habit of grinding hopelessly all through the night. Additionally -- and unlike the LM500 -- the LM9250 suffered from a serious design flaw that caused it oftentimes to create a pile of dirty litter underneath the receptacle. I think my wife and I put up with it for a few months before I finally tossed its girthsome frame into the garbage.

Now, we've come full circle. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on LitterMaid products (especially the receptacles -- what a racket!), we've reverted to a $5 tray with absolutely no electronic anything. Sure, we still have to scoop the cats' used litter manually, but in all honesty, we had to do that with the LitterMaid models anyway -- at least this way, we don't have to shell out $20 or so for a box of 15 receptacles.

In fairness, I'll confess to knowing people who are at least relatively pleased with their LitterMaid devices. Perhaps the cat poop fairies liked them better than they liked us. Perhaps I'll never know. All I can say empirically is that I am not a fan of LitterMaid.