Vacuum cleaner salesmen suck the life from you The Age
I BOUGHT a vacuum cleaner the other day. I confess this is not the most exciting of purchases. It is really just a dirt bag with a pipe. But it caused me to have a minor meltdown in Mrs Average. I'm not fond of those. They never end well.
At the moment I'm slap in the middle of my first attempt at house painting. Until now I was blissfully unaware of the supply of dust and paint scrapings that would fill my house, hair and eyes. It wasn't long before I realised my crappy Dustbuster, with a hose held together by gaffer seal, was never going to do the clean-up job required.
I headed off to a large chain store that specialises in high-presentation suction machines, TVs and white goods, in a Homemaker Centre. These are really just big tin sheds tarted up to look like part stores. One-stop shops for budding Jamie Duries who embrace the renovation dream, then relive the unpreventable failure every day when they look at their broken water feature and half-finished pergola.
I enter the pile up and am faced with a selection of vacuums that seem to be designed by six-year-old boys who like multicoloured spaceships. How a jet-lots exterior improves vacuuming performance is beyond me.




