Suction

Inspirational song: Boney Fingers (Hoyt Axton)

There is a tangent coming off of the Great Appliance Massacre of 2023. A spur, if you will. A painful bone spur. The first thing I wanted to do today was shampoo the rug in the living room, so it would be completely dry by Wednesday. It took me some shuffling around to get to the point of being able to start that. I had to argue with my cordless vacuum to get it to suck in the right way. It kept clogging up on dog hair and crunchy leaf droppings. By the time it had to go back on the charger, the rug was close enough to done to shampoo. I futzed around a little more, and then filled up the tank on the shampooer. I started in the back corner, under Mr S-P's chair, and right away noticed that the machine wasn't drawing up water. Thus began an eight-hour (so far) saga of tearing the shampooer apart, reassembling, and failing to suck or soak. We tried everything. I dug out one of those gallon sprayers, and used that to saturate the rug, and it still didn't pull up water.

I only disassembled as much of the machine as I was comfortable with. Just the regular stuff I do to clean it. I tried pouring a little vinegar in the part where the tank mates to the sprayer, thinking maybe it was just a little clog. When all my cleaning measures failed, the Mr got out the tools. He pulled it partway apart, cleaned the deeper reaches, and tried it again. I noticed a scent, and told him it smelled like he lit a match. On the next tear-down, he found the burned-out hole in a plastic part that I smelled. It still didn't fix it. He went at it again, stripping it down to the motor and wires, significantly farther than most laypeople know how to handle. (Did I mention he used to repair and maintain airplanes in his youth?) The last time through left black powdered plastic and rubber bits on the rug, but gained nothing in suction.

Before the last assembly was completed, I started poking around on Amazon. I could get a basic model delivered between 4 and 8 am tomorrow. I told him that. He had to go buy cat food anyway, so he is currently on an epic quest to find a deal remotely close to the Amazon one that he could get tonight. I told my daughter about this, and she chastised me for wanting to make an underpaid and overworked Amazon driver bring it to me. I finally found the right words to express that now that my disability has advanced such that housework is this painful and difficult (a whole other blog post's worth of aches and pains), I can no longer maintain an ethical dislike of Amazon. As I told her, righteousness is a privilege of the abled. I'm ready to have things delivered to me.