Half-Day Job

What you see here is what took the past two days to accomplish: our annual cleaning of our carpets before the holidays, which has always been a half-day job. Why? Because I am cursed, that's why.

Backstory first: we have very old carpeting in our house, circa 1997, which I work hard to keep in good shape. Twice a year we clean it ourselves with a rental carpet cleaning machine. We're pretty clean people, and keep our dogs clean, but even vaccuuming every week doesn't get up all the dirt.

Sidebar on the curse: I have very bad luck during the holidays. Usually I'm not cursed during the preparation for the festivities; the bad luck happens on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve or Day. Occasionally it will start just after Halloween. Usually.

Also, you know how they say "Someday you will laugh about this" whenever disasters happen? Right. No. Never.

Wednesday morning we got up early to pick up from our local home improvement store the rental machine that has worked so well for us all these years. I am not naming names for reasons that will become obvious shortly. When we got it home we discovered it had no suction. A fluke, of course. We then returned it to the store and exchange it for another, and they kindly gave us an extra hour on the rental to make up for the inconvenience.

The second machine worked for about five minutes before it began spewing water everywhere. Clean and dirty water, as it happens. My guy of course had to keep using it while he tried to figure out what was wrong. This soaked the carpet in the front room with clean and dirty water that began to seep into the kitchen. I spent some time mopping up that with old towels before my guy gave up.

Sidebar #2: Why do the holidays always curse me in some way, you may ask? I don't know. It's the mystery of my life.

We stopped to have some lunch before we took the second machine back to the store and exchanged it for a third machine. The store clerk gave us the newest-looking machine in hopes of that working. Third time's a charm, right?

Nope. The third machine did not have any suction, either. It did spit out huge gobs of flea-speckled gray pet hair and dirty water all over our floors, however. Interestingly my pets are not gray and they don't have fleas because we use a very expensive flea treatment to keep them that way. You can imagine the look on my face while I watched my soaked, filthy carpets getting dirtier. At least the fleas had all drowned.

We considered taking the third machine back for another exchange, but at this point it was dinner time and we saw ourselves doing this for eternity, or at least until Christmas, which is almost the same. So we decided to try to fix the third one ourselves.

I handled clearing out the icky flea-and-pet-hair gobs, which I pulled out with pliers from various nooks and crannies while my guy did the mechanical. We actually had to take the machine apart for him to reseat an internal hose with an accordion sleeve that had come apart from the collar and chute leading to the machine return tank (and that's why it was just spewing the grossness everywhere.)

When we put it back together the machine worked like a dream, and we got started on cleaning the carpets at 4 pm, which is why a half-day job took us two days -- and why I am cursed.