It’s time to lay to rest a member of our family who, for the past half decade, has been doing all my dirty work—and sucking miserably at it.
I wouldn’t recommend a Kenmore vacuum cleaner. I had to go over the same spot up to three times before it would pick anything up. Granted, I probably should’ve bent over and picked up all those marbles, dice, coins, marker caps, Legos, puzzle pieces, hairbands, Barbie clothes and tiny GI Joe figurines by hand. But every time it made that high-pitched wheezing sound just before regurgitating dust, dirt and dog fur all over the floor, I wanted to take it by the nozzle, wrap the cord around it and beat it with its own hose.
Here my old friend appears just after it was violently disassembled and tossed into the garbage. Not much of a funeral, but it had to do.
As a fun little sidenote, you’ll notice in the middle of it is a photograph. It’s too small to make it out, but it’s a class yearbook picture of me during my early teaching years. That was the year my school’s photography company of choice decided to distribute 5X7, wallet sized and sticker pictures of every student and teacher in the building. You can imagine what every wall, desk, locker and bathroom stall looked like by the end of the day.
If you’ll reach into the depths of your long lost thirteen-year-old mind, you can imagine how much fun you would’ve had if you’d ever gotten hold of any of your teachers’ faces in the form of a package of stickers.
And while you’re still in the juvenile mindset, I’d like to point out that my husband decided that year to stick every last one of those pictures all over our house. And the only surviving sticker is the one you see here—just in case, he explained, there’s ever any confusion over which one of us has sole proprietary and operational rights over the vacuum cleaner.
Doug’s funny like that.
So good-bye, my friend. I suppose for all I put you through, you did an admirable job. But the truth of the matter is, I had to get rid of you not because you sucked—but because you didn’t suck enough.
Doug has a funny joke for that one, too, but I’m reluctant to share it. I’d hate to offend anyone with blatant predictability.