I ABHOR MY VACUUM

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I hate my vacuum cleaner, and I feel absolutely no remorse for it.

I hate it with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. If my vacuum cleaner were drowning in a lake, not only would I not save it, I would go get a hose and add water to the lake.

It didn’t start out this way. When I bought the vacuum, it was the cat’s meow. It was a super-duper, top of the line model. It sucked up everything in its path. You had to be careful when you vacuumed, lest you suck up a lamp cord or the dog.

But after a few months, its performance began to wane. It turned into the Randy Moss of vacuum cleaners. It would work when it was good and ready to work, and not at all on my timetable. This tends to present a problem when you’ve got company coming over in six minutes and a one-year-old has just tackled a plant.

But I trudged along with my vacuum, only slightly disliking it. And then, one day, just to spite me, it quit working altogether. When I turned it on, it made this shrill whirring noise, which even my tin ear can tell was not a good sign. I also noticed that none of the parts that previously moved were moving, so I figured that was bad, too.

I took it to a repair shop, where I was informed that the motor was probably blown. That, or a sock was lodged in it. They told me how much it would cost to take it apart and determine a problem. Being budget conscience, I said, “Well, on the off chance that it’s a sock (or the dog) lodged in there, I think I may just take it apart myself.” The people behind the counter looked at each other and chuckled. My guess is a substantial amount of their business comes from fixing vacuums that have been taken apart by the likes of me.

I finally just decided to have them take care of everything while I kept all of my fingers attached. My vacuum is apparently stocked with Ferrari parts, based on what it cost to fix it. But I had a working vacuum, although it was about six times as loud as it was. Perhaps they added turbo.

So the vacuum came home, louder but working. It did its job for a while, but we still weren’t on the best of terms. I knew it was planning something. My wife had been vacuuming the bedroom, when she called me to tell me that it wasn’t picking up anything. No problem, I thought. Probably clogged. I opened up all of the places where I could safely stick fingers and not have them sliced off of my hand and picked out a few chunks of carpet here and some dirt there. I fired it back up. The roller on the bottom began spinning as it was supposed to, but upon close examination of the tube that ran into the bag, I noticed that there was no suction whatsoever. I’m no physics expert, but I’m fairly certain that to get dirt to go against gravity, there needs to be some help.

I decided to do what any self-respecting man would do. I grabbed a flashlight and a screwdriver and quickly turned my vacuum into about 600 random vacuum parts. I then put it back together, to see if I had tricked it into working. Nothing.

I then took the next logical step, which was to make sure my daughter was out of the room and tell the vacuum just what I thought of it.

About that time, the phone rang, and it was my sister, with this advice:

SISTER: Hey, what are you doing?

ME: Yelling at my vacuum cleaner.

SISTER: Why?

ME: Because it’s broken and REST OF SENTENCE DELETED OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE READERS

SISTER: Is it a Dirt Devil?

ME: No, why?

SISTER: Because you should have bought a Dirt Devil, that’s why.

Thanks, Sis, great help. After wrapping up her Dirt Devil hard sell, I retreated to the modern man’s Agora, the garage. There, I saw my shop vac, which is one of the four essential additions every garage needs. (The other three are a circular saw, a workbench, and a first aid kit.)

I lugged the canister up the stairs and finished vacuuming, mainly picking up the pieces that had fallen out during my initial vacuum inspection. The ol’ faithful shop vac, there to help in a time of crisis.

Some time in the near future, I am going to have to break down and get a new vacuum. I need one that will (a) work and (b) not break. Pretty straightforward. I don’t know why, but I think I may try a Dirt Devil.