A few years ago my husband bought me one of those cordless battery-operated vacuum cleaners. I didn’t want to spend the money, but he kept insisting that “we” needed it. I really think he meant “You should vacuum the house occasionally and this will make it easy.”
It was ordered and arrived, and he excitedly pried the box open. The kitchen began to fill with cardboard packaging and odd- shaped plastic parts.
The dogs backed off. So did I. My husband, who loves gadgets, waded happily through the chaos, demonstrating what the parts did.
“Uh huh,” I said from the the other side of the room after each part appeared and was introduced.
“And then it has this and, uh, this,” he said, hauling out strange twisted add-ons that even he couldn’t identify.
“It’s going to be great!” he insisted, surveying the pile of tubes, cannisters and brushes.
In addition to all its parts, the vacuum has its own hanging rack and charging station that had to be affixed to a wall.
“Where are we going to keep it?” I asked. “It’s going to need its own room, and we don’t seem to have an extra one.”
“We’ll find a place,” said the eternal optimist. We did. It now takes up most of a wall in our bathroom, where it interferes with the decor. I had to buy it a metal basket for its appendages, which took up even more space.
It has to charge for three and a half hours but it sucks up dog hair for only 45 minutes without a re-charge. I haven’t vacuumed for 45 consecutive minutes since about 1975, though, so that’s okay. It is supposed to do the work, but it seems to have kept me pretty busy charging it, putting its parts on and cleaning it.
A few months after we got it, it quit working. We hauled it to Jackson, where we finally found someone who fixes vacuums. “It’s very dirty,” he accused, as if I had betrayed the thing by using it to suck up dirt.
“It cleans floors, so it would get dirty,” I replied. My logic went unappreciated. He glumly cleaned it out, but after paying him, I decided I’d have to be the vacuum cleaner’s cleaner myself. Another thing to do. Goody.
It reminded me of the Salad Slinger we bought. It had 173 parts, some of which I never even identified, much less figured out how to use. It chopped things nicely, but it required its own separate cabinet and hours of hand-washing to get all the dicers and slicers clean. I think we used it once.
It and the vacuum cleaner are two of those things we buy to serve us and make our lives easier, that instead require us to serve them and make our lives more difficult.
Automobiles fall into the same category of “useful” items that require us to serve them. They keep us from having to walk, but there’s a cost.
My dad used to buy a new car and immediately spread beach towels over the seats so that they wouldn’t get worn or dirty. For four years, he and Mother sat on garishly bright towels that didn’t match the car’s nice interior. She had to wash the towels occasionally, then smooth them carefully back over the seats. Meanwhile, Daddy was replacing the pieces of cardboard he kept in the floorboard to prevent dirtying it with his feet.
At the end of four years they would buy a new car and sell the old one, never having enjoyed its pretty interior and spending a lot of time cleaning it to impress the next owner, who is the one who really got to enjoy the car. It always seemed to me that my parents worked hard to serve the Mercury Grand Marquis that lived in the carport most of the time and didn’t do its share of work for them.
I love clothes and I love shopping for them, but my wardrobe has turned out to be as labor-intensive as the vacuum cleaner. I spend a ridiculous amount of time washing and drying them according to manufacturers’ instructions (which now more often require me to wash the items by hand), changing them from closet to closet depending on the season, sewing their buttons back on, and shortening them to keep from tripping on their dragging hemlines. Do I own the clothes, or do they own me?
We adopted our first dogs thinking that they would dispose of left-overs or us. The dogs could eat them, and we could avoid garbage duty. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. As soon as the pups landed, vets began to claim that dogs absolutely could not eat table scraps. No, dogs had to have scientifically developed food that costs way more than table scraps. So the pups got the healthy food and we got back on garbage duty. The other day we made a special trip to Flowood to buy their vet-approved treats that cost half of our grocery allowance for the week. They snoozed at home on the sofa while we did this.
I’m not that smart, but I’m beginning to think there’s something wrong with having to serve the things you bought to serve you!
