ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Last week in Maine I saw a Bissell bagless upright vacuum cleaner stashed in the bathroom at the last office we audited. When I was finished, I asked the office employees who did the vacuuming, and what did they think of the Bissell in there? I’ve been considering vacuums recently and hadn’t settled on what type I should get. So I figure it pays to ask other people about their experiences. Anyway, one of the customer service reps told me that she usually did it, and she happened to think that vacuum sucked. Not in the good way that a vacuum should. She said she had gotten it as a gift from her son for her birthday the previous year and it was so bad she just brought it to the office and her husband got her a new Kenmore and she didn’t tell her son so he wouldn’t be hurt.

She said, avoid Bissell at all costs, which is what other people have told me too. Frankly this surprises me, because Bissells look very shiny and functional. They just look like they should be good vacuums. Just like how Dyson looks like it is not in fact a vacuum at all, but a small spaceship or perhaps a time traveling device. So I guess it just goes to show that looks aren’t everything. When I asked what brand she liked best, she said she thinks her Kenmore is the best thing ever. The one she had before this Bissell was a Kenmore and it had died after working for quite a long time. So she and Kenmore are tight.

I asked my coworker friend about it too, and she said, “Hoover. It’s expensive but it’s worth it,” and she went on to explain how she has used the same Hoover vacuum for like 50 years or something. She also confirmed that Bissell is bad. My coworker friend loves vacuuming her floors the way I love to cook, so I knew I could trust her on this. So I settled in my mind that I would buy a Hoover. I had no compunction about disregarding the CSR’s advice, because we suspected her of theft anyway based on the cash deposits audit, so there is no reason to believe what she had to say about home cleaning solutions.

So today I ended up buying the Hoover Savvy for $199. The keystone of my decision making process, and I was ashamed of this at first, was that this vacuum features a DIRT FINDER with “dirty” and “clean” lights. As soon as I saw this, I really, really wanted it, but I was concerned that it might be the type of thing that sounds like a cool feature but then doesn’t turn out to be all that useful. In fact it is extremely useful.

It glows an angry red when you first start vacuuming, to prove that it really was worth your time to haul it out and clean, because the red light shows you for a fact that your carpet is filthy even though your naked eye can’t tell. I think the real worth of this feature is that the natural tendency for most people would be to get bored and stop vacuuming long before the carpet is truly clean. Now granted, my carpets had not been vacuumed since we moved in last October, and who knows when before that, but I vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed until the green light came on to assure me that my floors are clean. It took like 15 minutes for the dining room.

Of course, this begs the question, how does the vacuum cleaner know the floor is still dirty? My boyfriend gave me some crazy story about how it probably has a sensor that measures the number of particles and bits that are being sucked up. But I turned it over and this explanation is not evidenced in any way, at least externally it is not. Oh well, it is probably just magic or something.