The sucking makes all the difference

I blame the good people at Empire Flooring for sucking all the joy out of vacuuming.

To be clear, I found the Empire team all to be good people when they came to rip out the carpets in my house and replace them with laminate flooring. Those weary, well-weathered carpets were long overdue to be replaced, and just watching the Empire team pull them up made me want to call a hazmat team as a backup.

The laminate they expertly installed the same day is beautiful, and when they were finished it made me happy to stroll past all three de-carpeted rooms in my house and gaze in wonder at how much more inviting those rooms now look.

But that was a year ago, and the truth is starting to sink in — Empire sucked all the joy out of vacuuming for me.

Oh, to be honest, I never really found much joy in vacuuming before they showed up. In fact, that’s always been my least favorite job to do around the house. Vacuuming carpets always seemed to get me sneezing from stirring up the dust, so I put the dreaded job off a lot longer than I should.

Which meant even more dust in the carpets when I did finally get around to doing it.

And the increased level of sneezing convinced me that it would be much better for my health if I vacuumed even less often — if at all.

That makes sense, doesn’t it?

In the end, I decided to get rid of those carpets altogether, replaced by clean, smooth laminate flooring. Now I just whisk my little battery-operated Shark sweeper over the floor when it’s time to vacuum, instead of plugging in that big electrified sucker to get the job done.

Of course, the Shark only picks up the big chunks, sort of like an actual shark in the sea. Sure, a shark in the sea will take care of any chunky mackerel or mullet it comes across, but what about all those tiny plankton? Those millions and billions and trillions of plankton?

Nope, the shark in the sea pays no attention to any of them. And when it comes to those plankton-plentiful dust particles in my house, neither does the Shark sweeper, apparently,

I noticed that yesterday when the setting sunlight angled just right through the window, revealing a patch of flooring at the edge of the doorway, the part that never gets walked upon. The laminate looked as though it may have become discolored, or maybe faded a bit.

“That looks odd,” I said, and I walked over to sweep my foot across the faded patch of flooring, leaving a furrow of newly-restored laminate.

It was dust! Lots and lots of dust! And when I put my cheek on the floor and peered across its surface, I noticed quite an alarming amount of dust even in places I had vacuumed with my Shark just a day or two ago.

But I’m using the term “vacuum” in a pretty loosey-goosey way, because the Shark sweeper just has a rotating brush that kicks the big chunks up into a holding bin. There is no actual vacuum involved.

Science lesson: A vacuum is a space where nothing exists, not even air. That’s what the motors in your vacuum cleaner try to create — a little space in the belly of the beast that holds nothing, not even air. And if you open a passageway to that vacuum—like at the end of tube with a floor-sweeping head attached to it—then air can rush into the vacuum, bringing with it tiny particles as plankton-fine as the dust that a Shark can’t touch.

So, driven by that new discovery about my Shark’s shortfall when it came to cleaning up the dust, I trundled out that long-neglected electric beast of a vacuum cleaner and went to work, and soon enough those laminate floors were shining as clean and fresh as they did when they were first installed by the good people at Empire Flooring.

Because, it turns out, the sucking makes all the difference.

Still, I blame the good people at Empire Flooring for sucking all the joy out of vacuuming, because if there ever was any joy in that dismal job, it was that moment at the end when you could gaze upon your bedroom floor and see those symmetrical lines in the carpet fibers, now standing straight up at attention.

It is rare in our lives to encounter a true wilderness, and gazing at a freshly sucked carpet untouched by human feet may be as close as you can come to it in the modern world. In the past, the rare times that I could grudgingly rouse myself to vacuum carpets, I always stood for a moment after finishing to gaze upon my work, feeling like Lewis and Clark peering over yet another mountain conquered, scanning the vast virgin wilderness of untouched trees stretching out ahead and beneath them.

But imagine how they would have felt if they had topped a mountain only to find a vast parking lot lying ahead of them. That’s what it feels like for me now, because the carpets in my house are gone.

Empire took them away, at my request. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still blame them for sucking all the joy from housework. Because from now on, I will be robbed forever of that soul-satisfying moment of gazing on the virgin wilderness of a fresh-sucked carpet.

And that sucks, because my new post-vacuum virgin wilderness looks more like Mars than Montana.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com

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