Why my hoover is out to kill me

• By Alison
• 28 September, 2009
• Comments Off on Why my hoover is out to kill me

I am not a domestic Goddess, despite anything I might say to the contrary. I do manage to keep the majority of dust at bay. The idea of dried flesh floating lazily through my sunbeams really is quite distasteful. Especially when you can’t see it, but know you’re sucking it into your lungs vapidly. And especially when its other people’s. I also manage to keep the middle of the carpet vacuumed, and I occasionally uproot the spiders and move them along to a new corner of the ceiling.

But overall, I am a terrible housewife. We dip into cluttered madness in between tidy periods. But I would like to assert that I could possibly – just possibly – be better at the whole house cleaning malarky if I didn’t have the hoover from hell.

Inanimate objects are seldom attributed with such a violent effect on others, but mechanical objects are a totally different force. If they are made to move, then they are made to break down at the world’s most inconvenient time, or to behave in a manner bound to make you lose your rag.

I shouted swear words at my hoover today as it tried to kill me for the umpteenth time. Don’t believe me if you dare, but it’s true. My hoover is out to get me and it won’t give up until half of my face, or several of my children have been devoured.

I once had a perfectly nice barrel one once. It worked fine until Mr Boxer Shorts attached it to the electric sander while he was sanding the bathroom wall, and it never functioned in quite the same way again. We got a new upright one, but didn’t throw the barrel away. I loved the way the upright sucked the carpet up so hard when it cleaned that it parted company with the walls! You could hear the wheels trampling over the floorboards beneath the thin carpet. The centre of each room became cleaner than brand new. But the skirting boards and edges were nearly impossible with the annoying retracty hose. We had enough room to keep both hoovers though, so I used the barrel for edges and the other for the middle

One day I decided to get the barrel fixed and the nice man at the hoover fixing place serviced it and found a few extra bits to replace the head we’d lost. With a lick and a polish, and some gaffer tape, it worked nicely again. Never as good as new, but better than before. Which prompted Mr Boxer Shorts (without asking me first) to give the upright to his dad. It probably never got used again, especially since in transportation he balanced it atop the back of the station wagon, whereupon it fell out when the door was opened, and smashed in the front on the ground.

That left me with only one, but since it now worked ok I could live it.

Fast forward to the future. The beginning of one week Mr Boxer Shorts says something like “we’re just hemorrhaging money, what’s going on?” and I sheepishly reply “I am sorry, I’m addicted to buying groceries for the children, I promise I’ll stop” and by the end of the week he says “I’ve just bought you a new vacuum cleaner. It was on special, on £148.”

My jaw drops and collects dust so often these days that I wear a ribbon around my head to tie it in place. This thus prevents me from gaping at him like a guppie. The new vacuum cleaner turns up – the same as the old upright, but yellow. The turgid hose is again a completely pointless asset. But we now live in a different house now. It’s bigger, but with less cupboard space. So I don’t have room to keep two hoovers, and give one away on freecycle.

After a few weeks I realised that the skirting boards were now enabling entire communities to thrive. I had to get the hose out. I braced myself. Then I had a gin. Then I put the hoover away.

A week later I tried again. I hadn’t realised it, but the hose on this new one is not just as bad as the previous one, but worse to the nth degree by an amount even astro physicists don’t comprehend. The hose is stored up the handle, and activated by unlocking and pulling upright. The concertina effect then allows the hose to stretch across rooms. But where a normal barrel has a hose with some structural integrity, this flexible one is designed to collapse. And it does that so well! The elastic effect is bad enough when the hoover is off, but minute it’s turned on it starts to suck, literally.

The first thing it sucks, is itself, straight back from whence it came. And if – by chance – you’re holding onto the end. Perhaps doing something crazy like using it – you’ll prevent it from returning to the upright, and thus the upright will be forced to come to you. FAST.

Today I shouted at it – swore at it – after it performed the bungie manoeuvre and leaped into my face when I was trying to get under the radiator cover in the hall. It came bustling down the hall so fast that it frog leaped over my back as I ducked and tried to get out the front door without opening it. The postman hasn’t come back since, and I think it was my mail that ended up in the middle of the road.

I was worried that it was going to do that the week before, when I wedged it at the bottom of the stairs and stretched the hose all the way up to the top step. I knew I was courting danger. At some point the hoover had to reach full bunge, and then it would traverse the stairs at a death defying acceleration and flatten me comic style into the upper wall. It didn’t do that initially, what it did instead was a more insidious and devious punishment. I discovered a sudden new trick – the solid arm part of the hose actually slid out and locked into place, making my reach greater. This also left me with an area of hose I had to hold with my hand to stop collapsing which was always on the verge of pinching my palm cruelly. While I was fighting with this new and horrible danger, I suddenly realised that I’d wedged the rod into the turning point of the stairs, and my hand was crushed into the stair corner. I couldn’t move at all, and now the hoover was making juddery little spasms, as if readying itself for the bungie leap to crush me. The high pitched whine that started up as the hose collapsed in on itself was starting to get to that piercing level that renders all thoughts obsolete.

Suddenly I got my hand free and let go of everything. The hose pinged back down the stairs, took out the modem, phone and keybox, then sucked up the cat.

Does anyone know how long it takes to re-grow a coat of hair on a cat?