JANUARY 6, 2025 – (Cont.) Recently, my wife—whose portfolio includes Ministry of Household Procurements— purchased a new, cordless vacuum cleaner. It’s not a mere Dust Devil acquired at the bargain price of $39.99, down from $199.99, in response to a late-night television ad. No siree. It’s a high-end Dyson, a pricey machine recommended by our gadget-savvy son, who owns several top-of-the-line vacuums, including the Dyson. I’d been skeptical of this latest marvel until I took it for a test drive back and forth over our dining room rug and on and around my “gnome home” project table, which, on account of the recent cold snap, I’d moved in from the porch that adjoins the dining room. The Dyson is light-weight, maneuverable and has ample juice—as much as a Miele or an Electrolux.
Early Saturday morning I was all set to deploy the Dyson on a deep cleaning mission. Before initiating the project, however, I noticed through the clear plastic housing of the dust collector that said collector was in dire need of being emptied. I’d not yet attended to this function, and being new to the Dyson, I wasn’t sure just what button pushed or lever pulled would release the canister/collector.
ALERT: Because you’re smarter than I am, you already know what came next. That’s right—the bottom of the damn thing dropped down suddenly, spilling its contents—a large pile of fine dirt—onto the reading room floor because the resident dummy, namely me, hadn’t futzed with the canister over a trash bin or better yet—outside at least 10 yards from any point of home ingress-egress.
The worst of it was that this first rookie-dummy mistake was only the very beginning of the next 70 minutes of dummyhood that morphed into open psychosis.
After cleaning up the ironic mess created by the very cleaning machine that had been procured and deployed to . . . well, clean . . . I put the time-honored broom and dustpan back in the closet, grabbed the miscreant Dyson and sat down to figure out exactly how the damn canister was to be properly detached and emptied. Before I knew it, several parts and pieces had separated from the mother ship—the red fluted dome-shaped lid; a metal cylinder that seemed to be the business end of things; the vacuum handle, which also contained the electrical elements of the machine; and the (damn) canister.
All these parts were made of hard—and thus wholly inflexible—plastic. The more I forcibly toyed with the parts the more I worried about cracking the plastic or busting it altogether and getting myself into major trouble with the Ministry of Household Procurement. I eventually forced upon myself the Hippocratic Oath to-wit: Whatever you do, do no harm. I then switched from “brawn” mode to “brains”—such as mine are—mode.
Attached to the outside of the canister was a molded piece bearing various grooves, which appeared to line up with long flanges on the vacuum handle to which the canister was to be reconnected. The piece with the grooves also had a bright red lever with a catch at the bottom. It was the only component that could be moved without fracture, but as much as this dummy examined the (stupid) lever, he was unable to detect how in God’s universe the catch would catch anything except this dummy’s frustration.
The more I attempted a logical and analytical approach to reassembly of the aforementioned parts, the less compatible they seemed to be. In time I felt like a two-year-old who’d figured out how to pull down a flocked Christmas tree, spreading lights, tinsel, ornaments, needles and lots of fine white flock powder all over the floor but without a clue as to how to re-order the mess.
At this point my wife made the mistake of passing through the room, and I made the mistake of muttering, “How the hell do you put this together?”
“I forget,” she said in a calm tone that at once acknowledged my frustration and disparaged it. “Somehow I got it back together when I emptied it a while ago.”
Rather than acknowledge graciously her superior patience and intelligence, I went low and said, “Well, whoever designed this needs to go back to engineering school.” I was hoping that she’d pick up on my indirect accusation that whoever had bought the damn Dyson needed remedial procurement training.
“Look at the manual,” she said.
“And where might that be?” I said.
“I have no idea. Go online.”
I uttered an expletive and not entirely under my breath.
“Okay,” she said, ignoring my editorial comment. “I have to take a load of books to the post office and run some errands.”
With that I was left to my own devices—or rather, the @!#$% device that she, as Minister of Household Procurements, had allowed into the household and left me, the deputy assistant Minister of Household Fix-Its, to figure out how to reassemble.
Relying on my “adequate” smarts, I resumed my methodical examination of the parts to see how (the hell) they fit together. What mystified me was that the ridges along the side of the canister simply did not line up with the channels on the handle. This was a logical impossibility. Clearly the canister had been and was so supposed to be attached to the Dyson handle, and equally and irrefutably true was that no options existed other than for those ridges to connect with the channels. No matter how many angles of attack I tried, nothing worked. After losing at least a quarter of an hour of my time on earth to utter failure, I felt the swell of realization that I was inadequately smart. I mean, what could be so hard about cleaning out a vacuum cleaner dirt collector and reassembling same?
With rising anger but reluctance, I followed my wife’s earlier suggestion and searched online for a manual. This initiative, however, was premised on the naïve assumption that the search, “Dyson vacuum manual,” would yield the magic manual. No dice. In fact, worse than no dice. No Dyson, either. In my first go, I wound up unwittingly at a site where for $19.95, I could purchase a manual. Even in my state of inadequate smarts—but entrenched in my permanent state of Swedish frugality—I knew immediately that I needed to revise my search.
This move took me to Dyson.com, where I learned—surprise, surprise—that the company manufactures umpteen models, just as Post, Kellogg’s and General Mills produce a dizzying number of cereal choices, when all a guy wants and needs is unadulterated Grape Nuts. Conceptually, the existence of multiple models didn’t bother me. What frustrated me was that nowhere on our particular model existed any sign, label, marking as to which model it was. The five-minute search for what didn’t exist cost me a raft of lost opportunities–catching up with a friend; fetching a snack for our granddaughter; reading five pages of a book; watching the full resolution of the final arc of tension in a movie; adding nearly a half mile to my daily walk; making a wish upon a star. I was getting ready to drop a bunker-buster F-bomb out loud, especially since no one was around to be unsettled by it.
I scrolled through various manuals in search of front-page graphics depicting a model with a dirt collection canister that resembled the one on ours. Like searching for Grape Nuts among all the flavored sugar boxes up and down the cereal aisle, I found what seemed to fit my need. I downloaded the damn manual and opened the file. Scrolling down to the page featuring the canister, I stopped and zoomed in. Already in a semi-rage, I felt my scalp shrink when I saw no text; only an illustration with three arrows numbered presumably in proper sequence. They. Were. Useless. On the positive side, it had taken me under five seconds to recognize the futility of following the diagram. This was less than the time I forfeit on a regular basis when discovering with momentary alarm that the car ignition fob I thought I’d put in my right pocket I’d inadvertently slipped into my left pocket.
At this stage in the proceedings, I felt a mix of extreme frustration, anxiety over the precious time that Dyson was costing, and anger prompted by the ostensible limits of my “adequate smarts,” now compounded by the onset of acute OCD: I refused to be sucked into defeat by a divinity-damned vacuum cleaner!
To be more succinct, I felt the onset of psychosis. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
