Heavy Machinery

I hate vacuum cleaners. Not vacuuming; the OCD part of me has always found the patterns vacuums make in low pile shag carpeting very soothing. The devices themselves, though, confound me.

In seventeen years of marriage, we have owned two vacuum cleaners. (Did I own a vacuum cleaner before I was married? Don't be silly.) Both were light weight uprights, constructed almost entirely from plastic. The more recent is one of the bagless, HEPA filter equipped machines that are so popular these days. It also comes with an automatic retractor for the power cord, an excellent way to take out an eye.

Both vacuums offered multiple height settings, various attachments to enable the removal of schmutz from crevices nobody ever sees, and the new one even had a light, perfect for those times when you are vacuuming at night with the lights off. They also shared another, damning characteristic: they can't pick up a darned thing. They both sported stiff-bristled brushes that whirled noisily and made those nice patterns on the carpet, but whose purpose appeared to be mostly to collect hair, string and carpet fiber until the accumulated mass choked the machine to a smoking halt. Or wound up the entire hall carpet from one continuous fiber, whichever came first.

Even more vexing was their propensity to clog their innards with whatever it was that they were supposed to be removing from the carpet. The dust, hair, hole punch circles, glitter and bread crumbs that were supposed to be deposited neatly in the bag or cannister routinely gave up their journey somewhere in the middle of the various hoses that connected the business end of the vacuum with the bag. In machines that moved air as well as an asthmatic kitten on a good day, ten minutes of vacuuming closed down the airways enough to render them capable of little more than indifferently relocating life's sloughings from one part of the room to another. Leaving behind a satisfying pattern in the carpet, granted, but that is only a mild comfort. More than once, as I blindly probed the vacuum's intestines with screwdrivers or repurposed coathangers, searching for the last clot of debris, I wished for something to just suck all the dirt out of the hose. Like, a good vacuum. Too bad I didn't have one handy.

The really don't make them like they used to. I grew up with my Mom's Electrolux cannister vacuum. It required a team of horses to haul it through the house, and imprecise aim with the metal extended tube could rip the curtains off a wall. I was a church janitor in high school, where I wrestled with an fifty pound industrial upright every day. Not only could it inhale inattentive cats from across the room, it toned my pecs as well. When it came to actually doing the job they were purportedly designed to do, our recent feature-laden, plastic vacuum cleaners couldn't hold a candle to these beasts.

With the new dog in the house burying us in a cloud of sheddings, I finally could take it no more. Our vacuum cleaner hid in the front closet and refused to come out (I know this is true because when I did force it to go to work on the carpet, it spit the dog hair everywhere, just for spite). We gave up, and resolved to do what so many other defeated homeowners have done: we bought a Dyson.

Buying a Dyson vacuum cleaner is a little like going to the hospital with a splinter and insisting on seeing the world-famous heart transplant specialist: you don't really know if he's right for you, but everyone says he's great -- at least, you're pretty sure that's what you've heard -- and he costs orders of magnitude more than anyone else, so he must be perfect for the job. We went with the biggest model Dyson makes, with the additional "Animal" features. That screams of marketing hype, but it does come with a handheld powered head for cleaning upholstery in houses where pets are allowed on the furniture. Ours is not such a house, so that's clearly money well spent.

After one usage, I have to admit that the carpets did look noticably better. The garbage can was also full of several cannister-loads of grit and hair, one of those things that we are sometimes better off not thinking about. Best of all, the machine has not burned out a motor or flung paper scraps everywhere. Yet. After three days of ownership, I consider that a victory.