YOU CAN SEE IT SUCKING


and that really sucks.

Here's a new trend I don't understand: see-through vacuum cleaners.

I'm willing to overlook the bad, post-Jetsons, neo-Day-the-Earth-Stood-Still industrial design that makes them look like rejected set decorations from the original Battlestar Galactica. And I can accept the interest in eliminating the internal bags (and thus the bag changing), even if it does turn your $300 upright vacuum into an oversized, glorified Dustbuster. But what I don’t and can’t and never will understand is the notion that you and I and every other vacuum cleaner owner on the planet want to see all the dirt and crap and filth we suck up.

The whole point of sucking it up is that we don’t have to look at it. Ever again. And most certainly not while it’s swirling around in a vortex or a windtunnel or a nice little peep show window on the front of our vacuums. Do we really want to see, every time we go to the closet and pull out these contraptions, all the accumulated dregs and dreck and detritus of the last few times we ran them? Must we really store all our old dirt in a plastic display case and parade it around the house?

I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological salesmanship or gamesmanship or focusgroupship going on here, some marketing consultant’s theory and strategy in there somewhere that says customers will have more confidence in the vacuum if they see it actually picking up the dirt, that buyers will believe the machine is truly valuable and effective if they can see all the work it’s done, all the refuse it’s accumulated and exhibited. But, like most marketing department muckety-muck, this idea just plain sucks.

I don’t need to see the dirt inside a vacuum cleaner to know that it’s working. As soon as it disappears from the floor or the carpet or the tile, I have a pretty good idea where it went. And, truth be told, I don't care where it went, as long as it's no longer on my floor. I don’t need to see that the vacuum is storing it for me until I can throw it away. Hell, I don’t care if the vacuum is atomizing it or vaporizing it or teleporting it to the Magical Land of the Lost Dust Bunnies; if the vacuum rolls over it and makes it go away, that’s good enough for me. And I imagine it’s good enough for you.

If I’m wrong, if we really are all that lame and that literal-minded, then what’s next? See-through garbage cans? So we can watch all the food we cleaned from our plates slowly fester and rot for a day or two until we take out the trash? How about transparent toilets? What better way to know that our shit has really left our intestines than to see it swirling around the bowl long after we’ve put down the lid? We could even go ahead and make all of our plumbing transparent, so that after we flush we can run down to the basement and wave at our excrement as it passes by. You know, so we can be sure it’s actually leaving the house and not just lurking around somewhere in the pipes, waiting to attack like all that dust and dirt we always thought we were picking up with those silly old, opaque, bag-filled vacuums.

Posted: Sat - November 25, 2006 at 08:45 PM          

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