Theresa Lewis

When I first got married, I was under the belief that I was ready for marriage. I felt confident because I knew how to cook, how to sew, and how to clean. One would think I had an advantage over many other young brides. At least, I thought I did.

When we were setting up house, I found that we needed a vacuum. We didn’t have much money so we couldn’t get a modern brand name machine. My husband came home with a shop-vac. It was an ugly sucker, but I would keep it in a closet so no one would see it, but me.

I knew that there were other vacuums that didn’t look quite so ugly and were around the same price. I asked him why he chose that one and he stated that it could suck up wet or dry and it was pretty powerful too. He pointed out to me that if we ever had a flood, or the toilet overflowed, the shop-vac would be a very valuable asset.

While my husband was out running other errands, I decided to give the vacuum a try-out. It was a frightening experience at best.

It just so happened that I was wearing an ankle length caftan to do my housework. The vacuum was a large upright canister type with about one hundred feet of hose so I could vacuum the entire house without having to drag the canister from room to room. The vacuum came with a bag of the usual attachments.

I turned the machine on and nearly wet myself because the roar of the motor. It sounded like a jet plane in my kitchen and it scared me half to death. The noise decibels were about ten times more than what the human ear could withstand without bursting the eardrums. I quickly grabbed the bag of attachments and ran into another room to save my tender eardrums. I held the hose in one hand as I rifled through the bag of attachments to find the right one to do the floors. I actually needed two hands to get the attachment out of the bag, so I tucked the hose under my arm and leaned over the bag to rummage around.

A mere tilt of my head caused a strand of my long hair to fall forward. Without any notice, the vacuum grabbed the loose strand and every other hair on my head and instantly sucked itself onto my head with a heart stopping thunk sound. It scared the wits out of me. I tried to pull it off, but saying that the shop-vac was powerful was definitely an understatement. By the time I got it off my head, I had a huge three inch hickey on the side of my neck. That shop-vac was so powerful that it could have sucked the air, the furniture and the floor clean without having to go from room to room.

I was getting frustrated with the damn machine because the noise factor was totally unnerving me and every time I tried to move the head of it, it would gobble up something else. It gobbled my dress from the front and then as I pulled it off, it shot between my legs and gobbled me from the back.  It gobbled up the front of my dress again as I was setting it down on the floor. I screamed at it and tried to strangle it with my bare hands. It was turning out to be an instrument of torture, but I was determined to win the battle. I was sure it had a mind of its own.

The attachment for floors kept falling off and exposing the brutal end of the suction hose. I couldn’t figure that one out. I nearly snatched myself bald trying to extricate my hair from the hose. When it attached itself to my skin and to my clothes, I ended up covered in three inch hickeys that I would never be able to explain rationally. I had to do wicked battle to free myself, so why would it not hold onto the attachment? It didn’t make any sense to me other than to believe that it was possessed by demons. With that thought in mind, I thought the vacuum would probably win in the end so I ran back into the other room and shut it off and pulled the plug from the wall.

I dragged the vacuum out into the garage where it sat in a corner. I had hoped it would suffer from rust, mould, or any other form of rotting deterioration, because I made up my mind to never use the thing again. When I went out into the garage for something, I would never even glance in its general direction. It should have come with warnings like do not use if wearing loose clothing, or do not use if hair is long. When I moved, I left the shop-vac behind.