> Is there a simple non-humanoid automation I'm missing?

Yeah, just hire someone to do that for you. It will probably cost far less than " quite a bit of money".

That depends on where you live.

In India you can pay people to do this for less than $1/day. My coworkers there generally are paying 2 people that price even though there isn't enough work to keep even one busy - that way if one servant quits they don't have to do the work themselves.

For me I'd have to pay something like $30/hour after you account for taxes, their take-home would be in the $15-20/hour range. I'd also have to learn a foreign language because almost nobody who speaks English (or even Spanish) will accept a part time job making that little part time. I'd need an accountant to figure out the exact price of course so more cost but lets just work with $30/hour. It would cost me nearly $10,000 per year to have such a servant in the US, and the only reason it is less is I can expect servants to quit often enough that I never have one for the full year as they find other jobs that are better (30*365 = 10950 if they work every day)

That is why so many Americans (and Europeans) want robots - there are a lot of tedious things that we are doing ourselves that we would love to have someone else do but labor is so expensive we can't afford it. Even if you live below the poverty line in these countries you realistically have a rich lifestyle in many ways - HVAC, lights, smart phones... modern life as provided many luxuries that kings of the past couldn't get (don't get me wrong, life for the poor is hard despite those luxuries)