Eat Dirt, My Friend

For years, people were satisfied with an ordinary vacuum cleaner. You know the kind I mean -- the sturdy upright with beater brush, on-board tools and headlight (and by the way, those manufacturers who refer to anything on a vacuum cleaner as "on-board" are not only pretentious but really kind of silly. It's not a ship, after all. We're not going below decks to change the belt, for goodness sake. But I digress.)

You've got your upright, and then you've got your canister type -- that lying-down vacuum cleaner on wheels that has a long hose, wide head, no beater brush, and is always just a bit too short to reach the top of the curtain rod and the blades on the ceiling fan.

From the time I was old enough to vacuum, these trusty stand-bys operated on a simple principle. You vacuum until your machine doesn't suck so well anymore. (You could always tell when you had to actually pick up the little piece of string and hand-feed it to the vacuum.) This was an indication that the little disposable bag was full. At that point, you turn the vacuum off, change the bag, throw the old bag in the garbage, put a new bag in and -- presto!-- you resume your task.

Somewhere along the line, some genius had the bright idea that our vacuuming lives were far too mundane (and far too convenient). What fun was it to vacuum the old fashioned way? You couldn't see if your vacuum was working and you actually had to open the machine and check the bag to see if it was full. Who wanted to waste the 10 or 15 seconds that would take?

Enter the bagless vacuum. Of course you've seen them. Red Devil. Bissel. Hoover. They all have a version of the bagless vacuum, which has a very large clear plastic cup to catch the dust, through which you can watch the dirt, string, dust-bunnies and occasional Cheerio whirl by in a mini-hurricane in your living room. What entertainment! What convenience! Now, we could see the vacuum actually work! Now we would know that the cup was full simply by looking at the vacuum! No longer would we waste precious seconds agonizing over whether the bag was full. Now, a simple glance would do the trick. Plus, how cool would it be to watch all that dirt swirling around?

Well, let me tell you. It's cool -- until you actually have to empty that stupid cup. Can it be that no one actually thought through the logistics of this manuever? I confess, it didn't occur to me until the first time I actually had to empty the cup on our new dirt-spinning, hurricane-maker. But then it struck me -- I just vacuumed up all this dirt, and now I have to dump it -- where? In the kitchen garbage? I could already see that cloud of dust *POOFING!* throughout the kitchen. In the outside garbage can? Yeah, alright, I guess so. (As long as it's not raining.)

So outside I go, swirly cup in hand. I take the lid off the cup, open the can and dump away. Yeah, there it is -- a cloud of dust. Good thing I'm outside. Well, at least I'm done.

Oh.

Wait.

No I'm not.

What about that big old filter-type thing? Look at all the dirt and gunk stuck in that thing? Well, it pulls out okay. But how do I clean that?

We all know how I've got to clean that, don't we? Pull it out, and tap-tap-tap on the inside of the garbage can. More dust. Lots more dust. And it's still not clean.

Tap-Tap-Tap. Still more dust. And still not clean.

TAP-TAP-TAP. Still more dust. It's almost clean.

The solution, of course, is to pull out my trusty old upright, get the on-board crevice cleaner, attach it to the detachable hose, and suck that dirt right out of the filter on my new-fangled dirt spinner.

That'll work.

I'm thinking that, if you're in the market for a new vacuum, you might want to consider this little cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, I'm going to see if I can find a new car with a crank up front that you use to start it. Who wants to be bothered just climbing in and turning the ignition key?

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