Fear and Loathing in the Broom Closet

At some point I realized I had too many vacuum cleaners.

The number itself was irrelevant; counting is a bourgeois habit. The trouble was that every one of them had its own function, its own niche in the food chain and, most galling of all, a perfectly convincing reason to exist.

It all started with the Kärcher WD5.

A big yellow industrial beast. A machine you can trust with concrete dust, a flooded basement, sawdust, plaster and probably the aftermath of a small coup d’état. It sucks up everything. That is its power and its curse.

Once you’re done with it, the second cleanup begins: cleaning the Kärcher.

You open the tank.

It’s hell in there.

Dust packed into every pleat of the filter, hair wound around some part that was never meant to meet hair, the guts coated in a thin grey film of fine grime. To shake out the filter you have to go outside, find a patch of the planet you don’t much care about, and commit an environmental crime of local significance.

I told myself: what I need is a normal household vacuum.

But by then the house already had a Conga.

A robot. Technically.

The Conga engineers clearly believed that in the future man would live in harmony with the machine, so they built an app that rules this out. The result is a robot designed for autonomous cleaning that has to be switched on by hand. I walk over, bend down, press the button. It beeps happily and rolls off to automate a process that has just required my physical participation.

That alone should have been a warning.

Then came the Bissell CrossWave, and with it a whole new philosophy. It washed the floor: spinning brush, water in, water straight back out. After a plain mop it felt like going from a hoe to a mechanized division.

Everything was fine until the plastic brush cover broke.

I looked up the price of the cover. Then I looked up the price of a used Bissell.

The used Bissell was cheaper than the cover.

At that moment the spare-parts market did what years of education, work and rational thought had failed to do: it convinced me once and for all that economic reality is under no obligation to make sense.

I bought a second Bissell.

Now I own two CrossWaves. One is essentially an organ bank for the other, but both are still alive, which raises an uncomfortable ethical question.

That was the moment to stop. But we had long since passed the point where “should” meant anything at all.

The WD5 was still a huge, loud, unhygienic yellow bucket on wheels, and I still needed a normal vacuum.

Which is how a Dyson Cinetic Big Ball came into the house. Used, of course. By then buying home appliances had turned into taking part in the secondary circulation of Europe’s mechanized household economy.

The Dyson was beautiful: cyclone, big ball, no bags. It pulled in air as if it personally hated atmospheric pressure. And best of all, you could empty it without mounting an archaeological expedition into the Kärcher.

The man selling the Dyson looked at me and said something like:

— You wouldn’t want an old Roomba, would you?

A normal person says “no” at this point.

I said:

— How much?

And so there was a Roomba. The Conga now works the ground floor, provided I personally bring it to combat readiness, and the old Roomba is headed upstairs, where I expect it will live out the rest of its electronic life methodically ramming into furniture.

But there are also the stairs, the corners, the sofa — places nobody wants to haul the Dyson to.

For those I have a small cordless Zender with a motorized brush and spare batteries.

Spare batteries are a particularly important stage of the disease. One battery means you own a vacuum cleaner. Several batteries mean you have started building infrastructure.

You grab the Zender with one hand and it quickly picks up crumbs, pet hair and sand, its spinning brush driving the debris inside all on its own.

It’s very efficient.

Too efficient.

That is exactly the kind of phrase it all starts with. “It’s very efficient.” “It’s convenient.” “It was second-hand.” “The spare part cost more.” “He threw it in with the Dyson.”

And then you open the broom closet and find a whole fleet of specialized cleaning equipment.

Because there is also the extractor, for upholstery. It sprays solution into the fabric and immediately sucks it back out along with the dirt you had preferred not to notice. After the first pass over the sofa the water in the tank turns a color that makes you reconsider several recent years of your life.

The extractor comes with chemicals, naturally, and not just one bottle. Once you’ve got as far as extraction cleaning of textiles, it would be strange to stop at an all-purpose shampoo.

The same machine is also a steam cleaner: high-temperature steam, brushes, nozzles, hoses. Before long, cleaning the bathroom starts to look like prepping for surgery.

And all of that is just indoors. Outside there is also a garden vacuum-blower. Its job is to scatter the leaves across the yard, gather them back up, and convince the owner that this was the plan all along.

And then one day I’m standing in the middle of the house, running an inventory in my head.

• Kärcher WD5 — heavy artillery.
• Dyson Cinetic Big Ball — regular army.
• Conga — autonomous system, manual start required.
• Roomba — autonomous reserve contingent, upstairs.
• Two Bissell CrossWaves — mechanized floor washing plus a strategic reserve of spare parts.
• Zender — rapid-response mobile unit.
• Extractor — chemical decontamination unit.
• Steam cleaner — sanitary corps.
• Leaf blower — external operations.

And somewhere in the middle of all this there’s me, a man who only a few months ago just wanted to vacuum the house.

The worst part is that it all now seems perfectly logical. I can explain what each machine is for. I can prove that none of them fully replaces another. I can build a table: dry dirt, wet dirt, hard floor, carpet, upholstery, stairs, upstairs, garden, emergency spill, quick clean, deep clean.

And the table will add up.

That’s when the fear kicks in.

Madness you can’t explain can at least be recognized. The real danger begins when every next vacuum cleaner comes with a sound technical justification.