Organic Mutant

Goodbye old friend.

We’ve gone and done it. We’ve replaced one of the last vestiges of the me-phase of our lives and upgraded for the we-phase. We�ve been using a vacuum cleaner that lingered on from Felspar — the street that Wade lived on in PB back in the day.

The replacement had been chosen. I’d read about it, researched it & even convinced Wade that the Dyson vacuum cleaner was the only vacuum cleaner for us in spite of its steep price point. We were ready to buy it, but kept putting it off.

At the end of last week were walking through Costco when I saw it. There it was for about $100 less than the price on the Dyson website. So we threw it in the cart. We were ready to buy it, but Costco only takes American Express and our dumb debit/check-card has a limit on withdrawals, so we walked out without it.

However, I was determined that the next time I vacuumed it would be with my mon cheri Dyson, so we returned post-haste (that evening) with our little stack of papers called the shekel book & triumphantly purchased the DC07. Rowl! (Actually Wade went in while I waited with a sleeping Lucas in the car, the cashier praised Waduchi for his coolness in buying the vac for his woman, which he said made him feel better). We drove straight home and assembled the beast. I recommend reading the instructions as you put the thing together as there is a bit of assembly required, but it fits together like legos.

The DC07 is fairly lightweight considering its “tornado” vortex power or whatever the marketing-ease is on it. Wow, does this baby suck! It ripped one of those consumer alert labels right off the sofa. Now, I consider myself a regular vacuumer i.e. I vacuum once or twice a week & clean the floors on a regular basis to pick up the accumulated dust & debris — the dust, hair of many beasts, lint &tc of modern life. Needless to say there was quite a bit of hair, dust & lint in the clear chamber. It rocks to see exactly what you have picked up. We filled up over one full chamber of stuff in vacumming the 720 Sf of CasaWex.

It goes from rugs to floors very easily. I switched from one attachment to another moving from sofa to rug to chair to floor to floorboards in a matter of moments. All the attachments seemed to work as advertised and the rugs seemed a lot cleaner. In fact, one drawback was that they were too clean so that when new threads or feathers or crumbs or whatever fell on to the rug, I noticed it immediately & had to fight an uncontrollable urge to pull out the beast and�vacuum again.

The power of the machine is seductive for someone with my propensity to obsess over stuff and I found myself thinking about vacuuming quite a bit. Wade would be talking to me and would drift off. When he noticed my drifting gaze and lack of attention, he knew I was thinking of the DC07. One night, I found it hard to get back to sleep after giving Lucas one of his night feedings and I started thinking about vacuuming. If a vacuum were to inspire romantic feelings, this one would be it. Thankfully I have not reached that low.

Thanks to Adam Greenfield for his article on the DC07. His description of one of the minor pitfalls of the design kept me from experiencing a similar situation, which would have left me a writhing mass of anger, but he seemed to have handled it well.