The Dyson DC14 is the greatest vacuum I’ve ever used. One of my housemates apparently agreed and let someone borrow it. After a few days of asking around, no one seemed quite sure where it was so I busted out the big guns and posted these lost item posters around the house.
Turns out the vacuum has been held hostage in the trunk of someone’s car who kept forgetting to take it out when at the house. “Forgetting”, a likely story.
My cleaning methods are stepwise. Rooms or sets of rooms are purged of the extraneous. This has included trashing vestiges of youth, vestiges of family, and, in some cases seemingly, vestiges of others’ sanity. I recently attacked the chunk of rooms around my father’s bedroom and he decided to clean too. He filled four or five garbage bags with un-needed clothing and decided to do something he simply may have never done: use the vacuum.
I love our vacuum. It’s an early model Dyson and is capable of pulling a cats worth of hair out of the carpet. My brother and I have logged near a hundred hours on it and my dad broke it in ten minutes. Ten minutes. 10.
Me: How did you break the world’s greatest vacuum cleaner?
Him: I don’t know.
Me: Fix it!
— 12 hours later —
Him: Well, I think I fixed it.
Me: What was wrong?
Him: I somehow sucked up a ballpoint pen. I thought the Dyson was poorly designed but after the third hour I came to an understanding. The vacuum was more than the sum of its well constructed parts. I once thought it was overhyped plastic but I have learned. I’ve made peace with the vacuum.
Good to know my father’s enough of a man to be able to make peace with an inanimate object. One day I shall too.
I’ve always hated with a profound passion product commercials with ridiculous setups such as the vacuum cleaner that demolishes a pyramid of sand (my favorite was the hand-held vacuum that picked up a bucket of bolts on carpet, like they’d spilled there moments before a party was to begin). During my road to colonic convalescence I’ve taken to soup and cereal. As the cereal level dropped the box started wobbling, nudged by the ceiling fan until it toppled, lid open and landed open-side down on the kitchen floor. I lifted the box leaving a nice pyramid of cereal. I reached for the un-necessarily strong hand-vacuum and a piece of me died as it casually consumed the cereal that would have otherwise been left for the dog.
Next up: Dropping my bolt collection onto the rug moments before my brother starts a kegger.
I’ve always hated with a profound passion product commercials with ridiculous setups such as the vacuum cleaner that demolishes a pyramid of sand (my favorite was the hand-held vacuum that picked up a bucket of bolts on carpet, like they’d spilled there moments before a party was to begin). During my road to colonic convalescence I’ve taken to soup and cereal. As the cereal level dropped the box started wobbling, nudged by the ceiling fan until it toppled, lid open and landed open-side down on the kitchen floor. I lifted the box leaving a nice pyramid of cereal. I reached for the un-necessarily strong hand-vacuum and a piece of me died as it casually consumed the cereal that would have otherwise been left for the dog.
Next up: Dropping my bolt collection onto the rug moments before my brother starts a kegger.
The advantage to eating while on a treadmill is that crumbs on the track are quickly dropped on the floor where they form a nice pile that my dog Max sucks up like our Dyson.