When Tom and I started out our married life together we made the obvious "big" purchases all married couples do; house, carpeting, formal dishes, and a vacuum cleaner. I had the Kirby man come to the house for a demonstration of the "people leave these in their wills" vacuum, but despite the man's hard sale I couldn't see spending over $1000 on a house cleaning object, and we didn't have kids to will it to at the time. We eventually bought our first vacuum cleaner from Sears. It was big, bulky, and expensive by our standards, but it cleaned bare floors, something that wasn't a big deal back in the day. That Kenmore vacuum is probably still going strong today, but after spending tons of money on vacuum bags, which I had to drive to Sears to purchase, and suffering back pain from its weight we put it to the curb and bought a Bissell bag-less model from Target. The only requirement Tom wanted was power. The only requirement I desired was color, ease, weight, bare floor option, filters, and a bare chested sculptured abs man to run it. For the most part the Bissell gave us what we were looking for and was inexpensive to boot.
I liked it for about three months and then the canister where the dirt and grime from my carpeting accumulated began grossing me out. Each time I vacuumed a room I had to remove the canister and empty it, dust coating my shirt and the outside of the vacuum with a fine layer, not to mention my newly vacuumed carpet. The hose didn't reach up to my ceiling for cobweb cleaning, and the power of the vacuum was so great that when I accidentally ran over the trailing cord it chewed the coating and exposed the wires. It did the job, but it wasn't my favorite household cleaning machinery.
The week leading up to the Christmas holiday I spent cleaning my house, readying it for company. I assigned cleaning tasks to the girls. Darcy got the job of vacuuming. While she was attempting to clean the rug by the front door I heard a noticeable change in the sound of the vacuum. Being an expert vacuum user, I had her stop and empty the canister. When she did so and resumed her chore I noticed the sound had not changed. I yelled for her to turn off the vacuum and suggested to her that perhaps she had sucked up something that was interfering with the vacuum's stomach. She flipped the vacuum over to survey the situation, and after taking one look at the brush and roller, she threw her hands into the air, assured me she hadn't the experience to deal with this "mess", and walked away, not caring what her punishment would be for not finishing her chore. With a heavy heart, I approached the overturn vacuum and peered at the underside. The roller was so entangled with strands of curly, red hair that I couldn't even see the brushes. I was horrified.
Darcy: "That belongs to Madison, by the way."
I unplugged the vacuum and leaned over at the waist to set about removing the hair. I tried pulling it out, but there were four pieces of plastic strips two inches apart over the roller, making it difficult to get my fingers in the space to get a good grip on the hair. I straightened, rubbed my aching back, and got some scissors. I will admit that while I should have spent more time on my own surveying the situation, perhaps sitting down to accomplish my task, my adrenaline was quite high as I thought how my red haired daughters should be sheered for this nonsense. Instead I leaned back over the vacuum and proceeded to cut the hair off of the roller. It wasn't as hard as using my fingers had been, but getting the scissors through the spaces between the plastic strips to get a good cut wasn't easy. At some point my brain spoke aloud inside my head telling me to slow down and not cut the plastic piece, but the high adrenaline, blood pressure surge, and blood flow pouring into my upside down head drowned out the sound. Just as I finished cutting out enough hair to design a wig, I snipped one of the plastic pieces at the same time as the last of the hair. Again, instead of collapsing on the floor and inhaling to pull myself together, I marched around the house angrily shoving the two handfuls of cut hair under my daughters' noses.
Darcy: "That is NOT my hair. The color and curls belong to Madison. I'm just saying."
By the time I was done with my parenting message, the hair thrown away, I went back to the vacuum to tackle the cut plastic piece. I contemplated taping the two pieces together with duct tape. I wondered aloud if those pieces were even necessary as I couldn't see what task they were providing. Eventually, I said screw it, turned the vacuum upright, plugged in the cord, and attempted to vacuum the rug. Unfortunately, one of the halves of the cut plastic piece scraped the rug with its jagged edge and pulled out a few strands of the rug until my brain registered the problem. To solve it, I turned off the vacuum and put it back into the closet. Then I informed my husband we needed a new vacuum.
Tom: "You want a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas?"
My neighbor offered up his Kirby to finish my cleaning job, but I took the rugs outside and shook them, and swept the bare floors. Thankfully I had already vacuumed the carpeting before I broke the vacuum. The holidays passed, school started again, and finally I couldn't take the dirt anymore. One night while with the girls at Target after soccer practice I strode to the vacuum section and took a look. With their help I narrowed it down to three vacuums I thought fit the family bill, in more ways then one. I called the husband, who of course was still at work, and told him I was buying a vacuum. My first mistake. As I've mentioned countless times, enough that I should know better, one can not spring things like that on the husband. He began sputtering and asking inane questions and then wanted to know what the problem was with the old vacuum, despite my explaining the problem the same day it occurred. I could see I wasn't going to get anywhere fast, and it being late, I wrote down the names of the three vacuums that interested me.
Later that week one of the lead Yahoo stories was a consumer report on the best vacuums for the best dollar. I spent considerable time researching the three I had chosen, happy to find that all three came with a fairly decent and high rating on the sites I visited. This weekend I rolled the vacuum cleaner and set it in front of the closed bathroom door where Tom was hiding. He could not avoid it when he exited and together we turned the vacuum over, and I explained the problem, showing him the offensive piece I had cut. I then made mistake number 2. I told him I didn't think the piece was important and that a good snip, snip on both ends would probably take care of the problem. It did. Now he doesn't think we need a new vacuum cleaner.
A few days later I received this in my email:
I think Tom is totally gonna change his mind!
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